Some of you may have read my recent Gamasutra article, Game Tools Tune-Up: Optimize Your Pipeline Through Usability but I wanted to discuss something that writing that article has really brought to the forefront of my mind. As an industry, we aren’t very reflective on the methodologies we use regarding the development of tools. This blog [...]
04.28Tools of 'Love'
Here is an interesting video of the tools Eskil Steenberg has engineered for his game Love: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPIA2g8T6Hw] His integration with Uni-Verse is definitely an interesting take on what life as a content creator could be like without having to deal with load/save/export via files on disk. Verse seems to disconnect where data is stored and [...]
Several years ago, I developed an effects tool at High Voltage Software. I was rewriting the effects system we had used on Hunter: The Reckoning and a couple of follow-up titles while creating the tool. The original system had given us some really great results for our first generation Xbox titles and the company wanted to reuse [...]
When I was in college I was a double major — computer science and English. I know, I know, strange combination. Anyway, of the few things that people have said over the years that have really stuck with me, one such pearl of wisdom came from an English professor. He said that a piece of [...]
Thanks to everyone that was able to show up to my talk at GDC. I thought it went very well, and I got a lot of good questions and feedback after the lecture. The focal points of the lecture were: Indirection of file locations using unique IDs instead of string paths to allow files to [...]
A few weeks ago, I posted a survey on game middleware from Mark DeLoura . Well, the survey is done, and Mark has been nice enough to share the results and some analysis on Gamasutra. All of the analysis here is very interesting, but I find the concerns over rapid prototyping tools and asset turn-around [...]
Again, here I am late with the Best of Comments post, but, hey, better late than never right? My post about Darius’s ad-hoc level editor by far created the most traffic and comments so far, and a lot of people made some excellent observations about the simple, yet effective tools. First, sjml reports on an [...]
I have a co-worker, Darius, who is creating a game for a small game system called the Meggy Jr. Watching him work on this, I was impressed with the tools that he came up with. He’s not a (really) a programmer, but still somehow can make tools that serve his needs pretty well. I’ll let [...]
02.17Middleware Survey
Mark DeLoura, probably known most famously as the creator of the excellent book series Game Programming Gems, is conducting a survey on game industry middleware. And what is middleware than one giant tool right? From his blog post: After some discussions with game engine middleware manufacturers, I decided to post a couple of surveys to [...]
Regardless of what they think and regardless of whether it’s formalized, I think every game company has a tools team in some form or another. Every field of game development needs tools, and every field very frequently needs custom tools to get their jobs done more efficiently. Certainly, designers, programmers, and artists have the most [...]