Monthly Archives: September 2008

Physical Queries for the Math Challenged: Real-time Shadows

By Alex Schearer | September 28th, 2008
Recently I’ve been working on a new game whose gameplay is centered around shadows. This meant that I needed to implement a shadow system which could: Generate “realistic” shadows for objects Allow for shadows to be cast at different angles Be efficient Of course, I wanted to avoid all the complex math which tends to [...]

Automate Everyday Tasks with Ant

By Alex Schearer | September 22nd, 2008
Alright, so I’ve got to confess that I love to write makefiles and similar things. There’s something immediately rewarding about automating commonly performed tasks. That’s why I thought I would share some of the cool things you can do with ant.

Game Design and Iterative Development

By Alex Schearer | September 13th, 2008
I recently started developing my next game, Shade. The fundamental gameplay was outlined by Lost Garden but there are still a lot of unknowns. The truth is, for any game there are a lot of problems which will not be fully understood until further in the development process. For instance, in Shade the player moves [...]

How to Find and Use Artwork for Tile Based Games

By Alex Schearer | September 7th, 2008
Here’s another article for the uninitiated. I found that creating artwork which was ready for use in a game was very difficult. I easily spent hours on this or that tileset only to find that I had messed up somewhere along the way or didn’t know what to do with the end result. Now after [...]

  • About Me

    Hello, my name is Alex Schearer. I grew up in New York and currently live in Seattle.

    I am a software engineer who works on Microsoft Exchange by day and indie games at night, and this is my blog about game development.

    More details about me.

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