Wouldn't subversion's command-line output be more readable if it were horrifically color-coded by way of a C# wrapper that P/Invokes down to Win32's ::SetConsoleTextAttribute function to do its work?! I thought so too!
C++ enums are great in practice, but they're a bit lacking once you really start flexing them. Don't get me wrong, they're definitely a step up from #defines, but you can't help but wish for more.
Ever since I've been in the games industry, I've wished that come March, whichever company I'm working for at the moment, would shut down for a week and send everybody to GDC. I've been lucky enough to work for great companies that have sent lots of people, but never close to everybody (or at least everybody who wanted to go).
Next week I'm flying out to Hannover to give a talk at the Game Focus Germany 2008 conference titled "Pragmagic Game Development Practices for Small (And Not So Small) Companies". It's about how you should always question how and why you do things the way you do, and never do something because "it was done that way before" or because "that's the right way to do it". Every team and project has different challenges, experience, team composition, and constraints, so everybody benefits of thinking about how to do things in a way that fits their project. I'll be drawing on a lot of examples from our experience at Power of Two Games for the last year since we're such an extreme case with just two people.
A couple of months ago something unusual happened: The functional test failed but I wasn't able to reproduce the problem right away. The failure was not a crash, but an object in the world ending up in a different state than expected. That's always tougher to track down. To make things even more fun, was object was affected changed depending on whether the game was run from the command line or the debugger. Oh, and did I mention it only happened in release mode? I've got a baaad feeling about this!
In this retrospective mood at the beginning of the year (and since there's nothing much new going on), I thought it would be fun to take a quick look at where have our Power of Two Games t-shirts landed.
It's no secret that I'm a big fan of unit tests. They provide a huge safety net for refactorings, double check the code logic, and prevent code rot. In addition, unit tests written through Test-Driven Development help define the architecture and keep programmers happy. They'll even catch a bug or two along the way, but if you rely on them as your only way to catch bugs, you're in for a surprise.
Spooooky Halloween update!
Power of Boo? Pumpkin of Two? Or, perhaps, an intimate recounting of a profoundly personal experience? Read on and find out for yourself.
YES! Buy it! Buy it all! Come one, come all to the grand opening of the Power of Two Games Store!
Seriously, buying a t-shirt buys lunch for one day here at Power of Two HQ. You know we're hungry and we know you're topless, so don't give us any bullshit excuses. Let's make this thing work!
11 bits, that is! Don't hold your breath for 12, though. 13 is probably right out.
I suppose this is more of a reveal than our 10th bit was. Our game has trains, light shafts, and physical robot crabs that might just be a little too physical for their own good! We have asset hot-reloading by way of MSBuild! The one question that's on everybody's mind (especially yours!) is: "Oh god please just make it stop! Will this madness ever end?"
Well, we hope so, because we're going broke over here. If only there were a way that you, our Gentle Readers, could buy us lunch in exchange for the chance to brand yourself with our mark by way of some kind of clothing. IF ONLY!
But there is not. And there likely never will be. Mmmm, nope. Definitely never.