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.
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Monthly Archives: October 2008
Global High Score Lists
Games have had high score lists for a very long time. In fact, for many past games high score lists were the main reason to keep playing. While this idea worked well for arcade games where strangers could compete asynchronously against each-other it didn’t initially translate to console and other single player games. Clearly, it’s [...]
Source Code: Learning from Past Mistakes
Quick update, I’m adding a new page containing the source code for my past projects. I remember when I was writing my first game I wanted to see the source code for similar games so I’d like to make that a reality for my peers. Please treat me kindly as most of the source code [...]
Game Design: Decoding State Machines
If you’re a game programmer chances are you’ve worked with state machines. Most likely, you’ve worked with finite state machines informally. For instance, your code might be littered with conditionals such as: if (lives > 3 && score < MAX_SCORE) { // keep running } if (lives == 0) { // display game over screen [...]
Distributing Your Next Game