Doolwind’s Game Coding Journal

For some time now I’ve been asked by a few people to write up my thoughts on a coding standard. To me, coding standards are like source control, until you use them you don’t realise just how awesome they are. Coding standards are a requirement for large software teams, however even if you are working alone I’d recommend adopting at least a simple coding standard.Keeping code consistent and readable is helpful when reading other people’s code as well as when reading your own code weeks or months are it was written. In effect a coding standard is trading development time for maintainability time. I’ve found that the ratio of dev time to maintenance time grows from 1:1 on a small project to something approaching 1:∞ on larger projects.

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Below is a short list on how I believe managers can foster a good software development team.

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Now that I’ve discussed why you should be using XNA, I’d like to look from the other side and talk about what Microsoft should do with XNA to benefit both developers and gamers. XNA is a great opportunity for Microsoft to get even further ahead of Sony in the current generation of consoles; they just need to make the right decisions to get there.

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A good friend of mine Damian Trebilco has just made public his new rendering technique. It takes the best parts of forward and deferred rendering. A paper on the technique as well as a demo showing it off are available at his Google Code page.

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Auran Developments went into liquidation late last year. Many of us saw it coming for at least a few months, if not years. Below are my personal thoughts on why Auran went bust. I’m writing this to try and help other struggling software or game development stduios from ending up in the same way.

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XNA has been around for a while and just recently hit version 2.0 (XNA Game Studio 2.0). It’s now ready for proper use and below is a list of reasons why you should give XNA a try, and even start using it as your primary development environment.

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Just spoke to some ex-colleagues of mine from Auran. Auran Developments (who hires the dev team) has just gone into liquidation and has shut up shop. The guys don’t get paid this week, they don’t get their holidays paid out, and they don’t get redundancy packages.

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I thought I’d give a little insight into the things I learned about making a game for the Xbox 360 controller.  I’m a big fan of the controller’s feel and ease in developing for it.  The added bonus is that the wired controller can plug straight into the PC meaning there’s even more coverage for it.  I won’t go into details of Xinput but instead give more general advice.  I’ll also share a little knowledge that an ex-Microsoft colleague taught me about its use.

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I have a lot of dreams about what I’d like to see in the future.  One of the strongest dreams involves game development education.  To put it bluntly, I’ve been unimpressed by what I’ve seen so far.  There are a number of courses around but none of them have stood out as being amazingly good.  Quite a few are too young to determine how good they are, but suffice to say, looking through resume’s of people, there’s no golden bullet of educational institute that guarantee’s a certain quality of programmer.  So what does my dream involve, and how is it going to change the way games are made?

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I finally resigned from Auran a couple of weeks ago.  I’ve wanted to try running my own software development company for a while now and I’ve been asked to write a book based on my programming personality test.  I thought I was going to be contracting at Auran; however it seems they’ve run out of money, or projects or something and I’ll now be contracting 3 days per week at the company I used to work with, MVH.  While I’m glad to be leaving Auran, I’m going to miss the team I was working with.  We had a great new game coming up, great people and some awesome tech made by the engine programmer.  It’s a shame that I’ll no longer be working with the team, but unfortunately there are some things I just can’t change.

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So as most people will have heard by now, EA has brought Bioware (and Pandemic). I, as many people on the net, think this is one of the saddest days in gaming history. Check out the pic to the right of what Mass Effect’s new box will probably look like.

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I’ve taken and marked a lot of programming tests in the past. I love doing them as it’s always good to see what challenges different programmers have come up with when designing them. Unfortunately, however, most of them aren’t very good. Below is a list of general ideas to help increase the quality of programmer tests.

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Over the weekend I had a little spare time and decided to try out Haaf’s Game Engine (HGE). After spending the last year working on BSG and as long as I can remember on CIC I decided to make a small game that would take less than a day. The finished product came in at 13 hours and is a “Geometry Wars” style of game with a bit of a twist. I’ve aptly called the game “Game1“.

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So I’ve been extra busy as always and haven’t had a great deal of time to post.  This time I have an excuse!  Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on my first draft for the upcoming “AI Game Programming Wisdom 4″ book.  I’m writing an article entitled “Scripting Your Way to Advanced AI” (check out more info here).  After working with Simon (our designer) on the singleplayer of Battlestar Galactica I decided to share my experiences.  I’m unsure how much I can talk about the article so I’ll leave it at that for now.  Suffice it to say at least one Dark Reign reference was snuck in there, imaginary sticker for anyone that finds it.

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So I’m obsessed with Company of Heroes (CoH), it’s fairly official. With crazy overtime over the past few months I’ve spent nearly every minute of computer time here at home playing it online. So why is it so good? What makes it stand out, and why should you start playing it?!

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Autism is characterised by the impairment of social interaction and communication. It manifests itself early in a child’s life (first 3 years) and is seen in varying degrees. Many programmers often show similar impairments to social interaction and communication albeit at a far less severe level. I’m going to be a little controversial and propose that great programmers sometimes have the ability to strengthen this lack of social interaction and communication making them exhibit autism like behaviour.

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Hi guys,

This is just a quick post to say happy Easter and let you know how things are going at the moment. Things at work have been going crazy leading up to big milestones so I’ve been putting in 10+ hour days for a while now. This has left me little time to work on my latest blogs, but rest assured, I have a number in the works. I’m currently playing Silent Hunter 4 in all its bugginess and as usual still playing as much Company of Heroes as I can with my limited spare time.

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Introduction
Having ‘more’ of everything in a game does not necessarily make it a better game. I’ve spoken about this before with Paraworld and it has come up again, this time with Supreme Commander (SC). I was a big fan of Total Annihilation, SC’s spiritual predecessor; however this game seems to have added more complexity in all the wrong places. Quite a few people I’ve spoken to like SC so I thought I’d put down my thoughts to let them know why I am having trouble enjoying it.

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So it’s finally official, Auran is developing Battlestar Galactica for XBLA. I can’t really say much more than that as everything released has to go through our publisher however I can say I’m working on it, and it’s going to be a great game. Below are some links with the full details:

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Computer Gaming Weekly released their first 100 magazines for free download on the net a while back.  I was reading through the first issue (November 1981) and I stumbled across an article containing a section entitled “Programmers: Are They Good Enough”.  While this is a nostalgic and interesting read, it begs the question: 25 years later, are programmers good enough?

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