This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

This LD is more awesome than the one before it even though I didn’t think beating LD21 was possible, until now there are over 700 games made in 48 hours around the theme ‘Alone’! that’s just impressive.. its gotta be a world record.

As I’m checking the games now, I’m finding truly wonderful games, and since the theme ‘Alone’ is rather abstract, the ideas vary widely.. yes you can still find many generic side-scrollers, but also many innovative stylish games built around a deep concept.

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

So I woke up today at 6:00am, left the house and went to Google’s gegypt 2.0 Developers event, and here I am home again, only 16 hours of googley awesomeness later :D

On entering you see this, it was a little lonely, but stylish

Inside there are multiple “tracks” each containing different seminars and events, and in between there was the chill out zone, and many other activities, and you had to pass through this Google arc:

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there. You say, ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid. You do that every single day. And soon you have a wall.

- Will Smith

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

After taking a look at a few real WebGL demos including a quality platformer game, this thing is starting to look and feel even better than Flash Stage3D, and definitely faster since it doesn’t have the bloated Flash player underneath it. And because it’s based on OpenGL ES 2.0 it offers both a familiar API and a fully shader driven pipeline, it actually beats all past plug-in based approaches like O3D.

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Great talk, how this existed in 1988 is beyond me.. :)

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

It has been an exhausting few weeks looking for a job in game development, at one point I was talking to 4 interested employers at the same time, I could barely keep up, and I’m still talking and getting evaluated, no solid job offers yet though and only one of these companies apologized (apparently they gave the position I was being evaluated for to someone else, or maybe it was just because going there might take 2 months of embassy paperwork hehe) the rest are keeping me around for some reason.

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

Ok so I got “interviewed”/tested by game company X at around 3am today (due to the difference in timezones)… and now it’s 5:30am and I can’t sleep because I’m still running on “MUST STAY AWAKE!” fuel.

I was totally expecting a voice interview via Skype with verbal technical questions and discussions, and perhaps a few tests or assignments. I was preparing my microphone, and video camera just in case, warming up my voice and drinking hot chocolate. Few hours ago I reviewed multi-threading, network programming, animation, shaders, the whole thing..

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

2 days of memory leakage hunting, I refactored at least 3 main components of the game (so far) and still about 4MB of memory leakage! who the hell is doing that??! I haven’t looked inside Away3D yet though..

As I’m digging deeper, I started to discover the horrors beneath.. you see Zamron had this life cycle so far:

1. started as a hello world to test pseudo 3D in Flash
2. developed into a proof of concept in only 48 hours, the first 24 hours of that was spent trying to get a pseudo 3D engine working correctly
3. decided to give it a few more days and called it wolf
4. arrived at a “pseudo” good experience for a flash game, so I started expanding it hoping to turn it into some kind of game, the biggest mistake I did was trying to use wolf’s code as is, I should have started from scratch here.. I guess I just wanted to do it quickly in the spirit of Ludum Dare
5. Zamron idea was born as my entry for ludum dare october challenge, I didn’t make it in time. But I’m pretty close to finishing it now

One of the worst problems I’m facing is the horrible base that was part of wolf, you’d think a retro fps should be simple enough to do, but as I’m adding more stuff to Zamron, those “simple enough” parts started to grow and get hairy.. which is where I am now, the only weapon I have against this uncontrolled growth is refactoring and more refactoring… :-/

This post is migrated here from my 2011 blog

I’m having an issue with a massive memory leak about 8MB per level in Zamron, even though I’m making extremely sure to remove and nullify everything after a level ends… Away3D seems to not have a hand in it even though it’s what I’m using to render the game.

Going to investigate embedded textures and also look for any lingering events that might be causing this. Definitely had more productive days..