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The Game Developer's Kitchen

3 weeks 1 day ago

Artistic Suicide

As a younger person, say in my junior high years, I became obsessed with classical music.

In particular, I had a Beethoven tape that I listened to over and over again. It was essentially a "greatest hits" and ended with the last movement of the 9th symphony, the big choral "ode to joy" which is now used to sell toilet bowl cleaner on television, which is, in turn, the main reason I don't own a television anymore.

 

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6 weeks 4 days ago

Carmack is Learning to Program, OR: BIT MASKS and The Multiverse

John Carmack is learning to program. A few months ago he posted that he was going to try to start remembering to use preincrement (++i) instead of post (i++). This gives me some hope, because he is already a legendary programmer but there's still stuff he doesn't know.

std::set vs ye olde bitmask

In C you can do something like this:


#define BIT_BOLD 0x0001
#define BIT_ITALIC 0x0002
#define BIT_UNDERLINE 0x0004

 

And then combine them freely using e.g.,

 

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35 weeks 5 days ago

Survey of (Implicit) Game Design Choices

It's useful to write down certain choices when they seem to be mutually exclusive. This is an list of certain choices you can make, in particular choices that might be implicit.

What I mean by implicit is that when you have "an idea for a game" you might have already made these choices without realizing it.

They are all likely false dichotomies in some sense, but hopefully they are useful "design axes" to think about where your game sits.

Sorry no pictures today, I have bike riding to do!

1. Mechanical vs. Narrative

 

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36 weeks 4 days ago

Vector Field Rivers, Tangerine Skies, Blah Blah Blah Marmalade Eyes

So, what's a vector field?

I know you were burning with desire to know this, actually probably (if I'm able to re-enable comments without being spammed into oblivion, er, please don't sue me bethesda) I will get a lot of comments telling me that I don't know what a vector field is or that I'm slightly wrong. Whatever!

Picture of a grid, each grid point has an arrow drawn on it, of varying length and direction, somewhat flowing together. Some are blank and I made a joke about not wanting to draw any more arrows!

 

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38 weeks 2 days ago

How to Make a Videogame Trailer on the Cheap

You don't have either Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier, or whatever other software that real movie people use, or video capture hardware.

You also don't have the skills or experience of a real movie person.

But you want to make a trailer for your game. Well, sounds like this guide is for you.

This is a long detailed post, because I'm like that. But the jist of it is:

  • Plan it out in cuts, to a certain tune, and try to keep the overall length in mind.

 

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