This ongoing series delves more deeply into each of the “six reasons your game development tools suck” as argued in my very first post. Two of the most important concepts in software engineering are abstraction and modularity. Abstraction allows us to categorize problems and write general code to handle all problems within a group, while modularity [...]
Some time ago, I decided to write a small C# “wizard” tool for enemy encounters and other level design patterns. The idea was to create pattern types, that designers could define with a small amount of data (different for each type of pattern) that could be exported into a much more complex xml format that could describe when [...]
Over the past few years, cloud computing has become the next big thing for enterprise software. The ability to easily scale resources to meet the needs of the end users cheaply is very attractive. Amazon, Sun, Google and now Mictrosoft (among others) are all offering cloud computing solutions. I’ve recently been playing around with the AWS (Amazon [...]
This ongoing series delves more deeply into each of the “six reasons your game development tools suck” as argued in my very first post. Many game companies struggle with delivering tools quickly and cheaply. Money is always an issue wherever you go. After all, the bottom line is what keeps a company afloat and it’s employees [...]
Many of the available source control solutions out there are great if you are a programmer. Both Subversion and Perforce adequately handle the storing of assets, but neither is very friendly to creative types. How often do “bad checkins” happen because some new and obscure file created on the user’s machine didn’t get added? Or maybe [...]
07.20Indie Game Tools
A lot of what gets talked about in the “professional” game development sphere is the high-end high-priced tools or those that were developed internally by a dedicated programmer or team of programmers. Where does this leave the smaller groups that are popping up now, those that are developing primarily for the iPhone or the web? [...]
I got an email recently asking for my advice on bug fixing vs. completly rewriting a broken tool. The email described the complexity of the tool in question being caused by the addition of new features on top of an already shakey starting point. This sort of problem always comes down to time and money. The perception among [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]