As always, when try I learn something new in programming, I find that writing up what I’ve learned helps me to remember and keep my learning organized. I like to publish my notes so that they can help others, and so that others can find errors and make suggestions for better ways to...
I apologize, but I don’t have access to a comprehensive list of all the talks Chris Sanyk has given at conferences. However, I can tell you that in the past, Chris Sanyk has given talks on a range of topics related to game development, including level design, game mechanics, and pr...
I don’t recommend this technique if you can possibly avoid it, but sometimes it is useful. If you are having a hard time describing an object’s motion using math and programming, you can always fake it by creating a special sprite animation, in which the motion is depicted. When the ...
and some may even be wrong. Because project assets can be inter-dependent on each other (such as an Object has a Sprite, or uses a Script, or references some other Object in its code), the team should have a good understanding of programming style/naming conventions, and ...
Everything else is just programming: if <condition> {stop slow_music; start fast_music;} This is easy enough, the trickiest part is probably getting the condition right to switch tracks, but depending on the game, that condition could be very simple, too. The only real complication is tha...
and all the calls to the sin() function are slowing down your game too much. Maybe your object doesn’t change its directional orientation, and you just want a simple vertical wave motion. (Or maybe you’re programming on an 8-bit microcontroller that has no FPU;-) What can you do?
Shader basics First, we need to understand what a shader is. A shader is a specialized program that processes graphics. Shaders are executed on the Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU, which is specialized hardware for accelerated graphics processing. Thus, shaders are very fast. As well, since...
That’s the basics of it. Difficulties The main problem that people have is that they have to adjust every variable in their game that is time-dependent. Not just speed, but alarms, image animation, and possibly even such things as the pitch and duration of sound effects. This can get ...