Distributing Your Next Game
So you just finished working on your latest project and it's time to let others play it. If you're like me you'd probably like to know some things about your game after you've released it. Personally I'm most interested in tracking how many people downloaded each of my games. It's fun to check in now and again and see that more people have tried my game out, and it's also helpful in figuring out what's popular and what's not....
Read moreGlobal High Score Lists
Games have had high score lists for a very long time. In fact, for many past games high score lists were the main reason to keep playing. While this idea worked well for arcade games where strangers could compete asynchronously against each-other it didn't initially translate to console and other single player games. Clearly, it's not as much fun to beat your past high score as it is to beat someone else's. That's where the idea of a global high score list comes in; The high score list lives on a server instead of next to the game code. This ...
Read moreSource Code: Learning from Past Mistakes
Quick update, I'm adding a new page containing the source code for my past projects. I remember when I was writing my first game I wanted to see the source code for similar games so I'd like to make that a reality for my peers. Please treat me kindly as most of the source code is total junk; unfortunately, I have found that tends to happen with game code! That said, there's code for several different types of games, so hopefully there's something for everyone. Anyway, I hope that someone finds this code useful -- let me know if you ...
Read moreGame Design: Decoding State Machines
If you're a game programmer chances are you've worked with state machines. Most likely, you've worked with finite state machines informally. For instance, your code might be littered with conditionals such as:...
Read morePhysical Queries for the Math Challenged: Real-time Shadows
Recently I've been working on a new game whose gameplay is centered around shadows. This meant that I needed to implement a shadow system which could:...
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