Distributing Your Next Game

So you just finished working on your latest project and it’s time to let others play it. If you’re like me you’d probably like to know some things about your game after you’ve released it. Personally I’m most interested in tracking how many people downloaded each of my games. It’s fun to check in now and again and see that more people have tried my game out, and it’s also helpful in figuring out what’s... Read More

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 not as much fun to beat your past high score as it is to beat someone else’s. That’s where the... Read More

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 is total junk; unfortunately, I have found that tends to happen with game code! That said, there’s code for several different types of games, so hopefully... Read More

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 } The above code works and certainly gets it’s point across succinctly, but it can get messy... Read More