Brand Game Development

APRIL 6, 2018

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Just here for Highway s & Byways updates? Click here. In 1519, Hernán Cortés and his 600 man crew washed up on the shores of Mexico. He had colonization on his mind, and he wanted to take over the Yucatan Peninsula. He was outgunned and outmanned, so he did the sensible thing: he ordered his troops to burn the boats.

Point and Click 130

Point and Click Dev Writing Fighting 130

The GameDev Guru

APRIL 1, 2018

After working six months on the remake of Diamond Dash with Unity I can say that I learned quite a lot from the engineers at Wooga on top…

Engineering 100

Engineering Engine Games 100

The Astronauts

APRIL 3, 2018

Introduction and index of this series is here. Let’s make a super-naïve implementation for a GPU! Did I mention that it’s going to be super simple and not optimized for GPUs at all? I did, good. This will be the “minimal amount of work” type of port, with maybe someday restructured to be more efficient. Why Metal? I already have a 1) C++ implementation handy, and 2) a Mac nearby, and 3) Metal is easy to use, and especially easy to move from a C++ implementation.

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Grumpy Gamer

APRIL 1, 2018

Well. 14 years in a row, the Grumpy Gamer blog has been 100% April Fools' day free. Maybe it's just me, but it feels like the stupidity of April Fools' is waining a little. Maybe my life's mission is finally coming to an end. It's also possible that I'm really playing the long game and once you're all 110% convinced I would never pull an April Fools' Prank, that's when I get you!

Localization 52

Localization Games 52

Brand Game Development

APRIL 2, 2018

If you are a board game developer like me, you are simultaneously privileged and burdened to live in this current time. We’re in an unprecedented era of creativity made possible by the internet and low barriers to entry. On the one hand, board games have seen a massive surge of popularity, growing about 20% every year for the last few years. It seems like board gaming just broke a billion dollars as a market.

Internet 130

Internet Advertising Media Data 130

The Astronauts

APRIL 4, 2018

Introduction and index of this series is here. In the previous post, I did a naïve Metal GPU “port” of the path tracer. Let’s make a Direct3D 11 / HLSL version now. This will allow testing performance of this “totally not suitable for GPU” port on a desktop GPU. HLSL is familiar to more people than Metal. Maybe someday I’d put this into a Unity version, and having HLSL is useful, since Unity uses HLSL as the shading language.

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The Astronauts

MARCH 31, 2018

Introduction and index of this series is here. The path tracer right now is small, neat and wrong. Some folks pointed on on twitterverse that there’s double lighting due to light sampling; there’s an issue on github about diffuse scattering, and I have noticed some wrong things too. But first of all, how does one even know that rendering is wrong?

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