Category Archives: tools

The Level Editor Sprint, Pt.4

Posted on April 1, 2012 by admin

My third attempt at a level editor for THE OCTOBER GAME succeeded, but not how I expected. As I mentioned last time, the game was feature complete including scaffolding like the Top Scores and Help screens. I’d found creating levels by hand to … Continue reading →

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The Level Editor Sprint, Pt.3

Posted on March 17, 2012 by admin

My second attempt at a level editor for THE OCTOBER GAME was a useful failure. A few months after my last effort, I wanted to try a new method of app development. Previously, I tended to write code in a … Continue reading →

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The Level Editor Sprint, Pt.2

Posted on March 3, 2012 by admin

My first attempt at a level editor for THE OCTOBER GAME was an instructive failure. Writing code is fun and this leads me to jump into projects, then drown in rising complexity. To counteract this, I try the simplest thing … Continue reading →

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Bug Hunting

Posted on January 14, 2011 by admin

Making THE OCTOBER GAME: Uninitialized Values are Not Your Friends While rebuilding THE OCTOBER GAME prototype to use cocos2d, I ran into a subtle and persistent bug: Any time the player quickly hit three bad guys in a row, the … Continue reading →

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Onramps

Posted on November 9, 2010 by admin

Making THE OCTOBER GAME: Finding your motivation I took a couple of days at the beginning of the month to let my brain cool off. THE OCTOBER GAME is my largest software development effort to date and I temporarily ran … Continue reading →

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Visual Thinking

Posted on October 30, 2010 by admin

Making THE OCTOBER GAME: The Nitty-Gritty To develop my game entities, I build in stages. This lets me give the code a workout without polluting the real app with false starts and historical artifacts. I’ll move the code over to … Continue reading →

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And what have we learned today?

Posted on October 17, 2010 by admin

Making THE OCTOBER GAME: Documentation and do lists There are so many things to learn when programming, that you need a system to remember it all. I keep a list of code snippets showing how to do something or if … Continue reading →

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If you’re going to procrastinate, at least get something useful done

Posted on October 16, 2010 by admin

Making THE OCTOBER GAME: Things to do when ideas are simmering When your subconscious is still working on a problem, it’s a good idea to have other things to do. I’m still not ready to integrate the enemy handling code … Continue reading →

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