Exploring the design and development of video games
Over the weekend, I completed my first Game Jam Hackathon – Games For Our Future Game Jam Another programmer and I, with the help of an artist, created Climate Pirate! It’s a 2D action game where you control pirates that capture oil tankers to reduce the carbon footprint of mankind and save the world from …
Here’s a youtube link if you prefer video formats or want to see it in action. You wisely didn’t focus too heavily on performance while developing. Here’s the problem: Now, you launched your game on a new, weaker platform (Android, iOS, or perhaps Switch). Or maybe this is your first launch, and you’ve only ever …
Let’s say you want to upload a file to AWS S3 from your Unity game. Well, if you follow the AWS instructions, you’ll probably run into errors. This guide helps you through the errors I encountered. Step 1 – Follow the Setup the AWS SDK Tutorial Notes: While importing the AWS SDK into Unity, since I only …
When developing software, we have to remember that our number one priority is to meet our customer’s needs – i.e., making our software usable. Performance is often a critical factor in usable software. Let’s see how we must consider performance in each phase of development to make our customers happy. (You go through these phases …
In today’s world, software tends to live on and on with many features added over the course of its lifetime. To deal with perpetual software, software engineers must write code that is maintainable. Maintainable code has two properties we care about: readability, the ease of understanding code, and extensibility, the ease of extending code later. As …
Chapter 3 – Billboard Design 101 In chapter 2, we learned people scan rather than read. So, we need to be designing for scanning instead of reading. If they’re going to act like you’re designing billboards, then design great billboards. Here’s what you can do: Take advantage of conventions Make it obvious what’s clickable Create …
Chapter 2 – How people really use the web In Part 1, we learned about usability and the importance of self-evident UIs. In order to create self-evident UIs, we need to understand how people actually use software. People quickly scan everything and click the first thing that grabs their attention. They don’t treat the web …
Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability is an incredible book to help user interface designers create systems that make users delighted. While intended for web and mobile developers, there are countless concepts all game developers will want to know. Here are my notes: What is Usability? A person of below …
In a previous post, we learned implementation inheritance should be avoided. But, what can we do instead? Composition to the Rescue We want to be able to share code while allowing us to switch out different functionalities on the fly keeping us extensible. Without inheritance, what could we do to share code? Let’s use composition! …
Author’s Note: PLEASE DONT FORGET TO READ PART 2 – PREFER COMPOSITION OVER INHERITANCE! – It describes the alternative! It’s what the Gang of Four intended when they made Design Patterns. THIS POST SERIES ISN’T ABOUT OOP BEING BAD – It’s getting you to realize THE TRUE POWER OF OOP – POLYMORPHISM (Interface Inheritance) with COMPOSITION …
Even with the internet around, books are great resources for learning about coding. Here are books I recommend. Clean Code I love Clean Code. It has so many small little tidbits that make code easier to read and maintain. Anyone who does any coding NEEDS to at least skim this book! My favorite tip: always …