
It has been a while since I last wrote on my blog. Which is not entirely true, since I have been writing posts, which I never got to publish thanks to both the amount of university work and my obsession polishing as much as possible. A blog gives me as much time as I want, which is a nice change from the time constraints of game development and coursework. In any case, not much has been happening since the bulldog switch in March. This post is an attempt at proving to the three people who actually read my blog that despite all the recent events, I am still tending it. In the shadows.
So, here is a summary of the upcoming posts, still in the works, that I will hopefully end up publishing.
A retrospective post about the Three Thing Game, which is several thousand words long, about the design process, and several recommendations I would give to people who take part in the competition. I have been a long time at it, mostly rewriting and rewriting, because it is very, very hard to formulate textual advice without sounding like a total self-obsessed idiot.
A tutorial on using shaders to make a 2D laser. As you might have guessed, this goes through the process of making the light beam in our TTG game. Most people in their third year would be familiar with shaders by now, although this covers the shading language found in the PSSuite, which surprisingly looks more like HLSL than GLSL.
An eulogy of genetic algorithms (GAs), to which I caught a liking. I will be describing their basic principles, as well as some the existing implementations of such algorithms in games. Although I am far form being a professional in the subject (I hardly even coded a GA yet!), the revisions for the NEAT module got me back into GAs, and reminded me how amazing they were.
I also have some various post scraps lying around, which will emerge or stay in the shade as hidden monstrosities.
PSS I’m pretty sure is CG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cg_(programming_language) pretty good idea to pick it up if you have time as it is used in a fair few other places
Good to know! I wasn’t aware that there were many other shader languages. Apparently, it outputs for both OpenGL and HLSL, which explains why the PSSuite’s shader language looks like HLSL but works with OpenGL!
Looking forward to your future posts buddy, the lack of time this year has been hellish.