It should be immediately and painfully obvious to anybody checking up on this blog that I have not adhered to my aforementioned weekend posting schedule, this being the case for a bit over a month now. I don’t really have any excuses, aside from those I’ve already summarized in Volume I of this “series”: it’s [...]
Archive for the ‘Development’ Category
Revised Office Hours, Volume II
Saturday, November 28th, 2009Order of the Draw
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009I’ve decided to follow up yesterday’s rather unorganized post with one that has a bit more planning put into its presentation. Today, we’ll be taking a look at a very specific part of a spriting engine: draw orders. The draw order of your sprites is a crucial element in any spriting system, and optimizing draw [...]
Sprightly Sprites: Bringing game worlds to life
Friday, October 2nd, 2009Today we’ll be shifting gears a bit, and exploring some of the more technical aspects of creating and animating a two-dimensional world. At the heart of two-dimensional animation is the concept of a sprite, a graphic image which can move and change within a larger image. Assuming that your “larger image” might be something along [...]
Take your hands off the keyboard and step away from the computer
Thursday, October 1st, 2009No, this is not me continuing to wax philosophical on the merits of spending time out in the real world with real people doing real things. That was yesterday’s post, and I feel I’ve more than exhausted the topic for the time being. Rather, today’s discussion is a delightful inversion of my typical advocacy for [...]
Sharpen the saw
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009Maybe it’s due to the insistence of one of my old college professors on starting off every one of his courses (I was forced to endure three of them) with a run-through of Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, or maybe it’s that I can’t really support any book that merely describes [...]