February 2, 2012

A Simple Thought

I wrote that we where doing some microprogramming, making the processor work etc. We had a lab about that yesterday and I was very, very nervous. The preparations weren't that hard, but they where very bothersome. Converting the instructions to binary/hex by hand is never nice. Turns out the lab was very easy! You also had the option to prepare everything before on their simulator, which dumb be didn't do.

When I thought about how to describe what microprogramming is I was going to write that it's what makes a processor work. This sounds a bit off though, couldn't you do the same with physical hardware instead of another programming step inside the processor? Well turns out that's what RISC is all about. Sometimes the qualms you have when facing something new are completely justified.

January 29, 2012

Speeding Ahead

Life is slowly settling down over here. School has started with some pretty interesting stuff this year. Firstly we have a math analysis course in multiple variables which is ok. I'm not a fan of the previous analysis courses but maybe this will be a bit different. We're contining with computer hardware, microprogramming and such, and I enjoy it a little.

When I started programming the big question was how did the code I typed into my editor become something the processor could understand? I've got a good feeling for different programming languages, and now including the assembly for 86k processors. Now the basic hardware, from logical gates to ackumulators, and code are being connected together which feels very nice indeed. I still like to construct and make stuff in a more high level way though.

We're also having a new course, it's been totally remade since last year, about software prototyping. I'm quite used to prototyping with my games but as expected a university course about the subject is a bit more structured and dare I say more boring? The course book, Effective Prototyping for Software Makers, is pretty good as it explains the design process in a formal, but not mindnumbingly boring, way. I need to investigate more but I'll definitely use some of the ideas.

The last course for now is the advanced course in linear algebra which me and a friend chose. Linear algebra was probably the hardest math course we've had but at the same time I think it's the most enjoyable and useful so far. And finally I hear it's very useful for programmers in computation and 3D programming so it's something I really want to understand.

Life with Veronica is also working out, mainly because she's awesome, and I went to a Taekwon-do training this week. Feels good to practice again!

January 26, 2012

Book Recommendations

Updated January 26, 2012

This is an unordered list of books I like so much I would like to promote them a bit. There are programming books but also fiction and manga.

Programming Books

The Pragmatic Programmer

#2 in the Stackoverflow question "What is the single most influential book every programmer should read?" and that is no joke. I have yet to read the #1 on the list, Code Complete, but so far The Pragmatic Programmer is the best programming book I have ever read.

It does not teach you to program instead it teaches you how to think as a programmer and small tweaks you can do to become more effective and smarter. It's a little hard to explain but in programming it's the small things that matter and you'll get a ton of improvements from this one. Read and re-read!

Modern Perl

One of my favourite programming books. It's not a book that teaches you how to program which practically every other language specific book does. It simply teaches you the Perl programming language in a modern fashion. It's not a cookbook but it contains a lot of "how to do this" which I found extremely helpful.

I read this book when I wanted to learn Perl. I had read the camel book before but I was a bit impatient to appreciate it I guess. Modern Perl is a very thin book, only 250 pages, but it teaches perl so well. If you want to learn Perl but know how to programming, this is clearly the book for you.

Learn You a Haskell For Great Good

A very fun and easy going book but it's also a good introduction to something as hard as Haskell. How do you get those two together? After you've read this one you'll think that's the way to go.

Effective Java, Effective C++, More Effective C++

I'm actually lumping these together but they are individually excellent books for their language. Some argue that these are the best and I would have to agree.

Misc

Design for Hackers

This is a great introductory book about design. Before reading this I thought programmers were superior to designers but that's a very foolish thought. I used to guess how my web page or my game should look like but now I know that there's something called negative space, receding colors and that you can go infinity deep in font design. Now I'm more aware of the difficulties and the thought and work that goes into making something pretty and usable.

I guess it's the case where the more you know, the more you know that you don't know. Consider for example a child lost in the forest. He's hungry so he picks some berries to eat. When you're a bit older you might know that they could be poisoned, but you don't know which ones. Now you're in a dark and scary place and you don't dare to eat anything at all! I used to be the toddler, happy and unknowing, but now I know how much I don't know. It's a refreshing feeling.

Fiction

Song of Ice and Fire

I have never been a big fan of fantasy, for example I didn't care for the bible of fantasy The Lord of the Rings at all. Bilbo, another of Tolkiens books in the saga, was good but that's it for my positive fantasy experience. But that was before I read this series.

Wonderfully dark and engaging, this is not the classic long vinding good vs evil fantasy (Tolkien I'm looking at you). This series is easy to read and very dark. The villains are the best I've ever met and yet (most) are not completely black and you will even start liking or agreeing with some. Fantastic.

Jeffery Deaver

I fell in love with Jeffery Deaver when I read his book A Maiden's Grave about some escaped prisoners who kidnap a school buss full of deaf girls. The situation escalates to a hostage situation with non-stop action. His book The Cold Moon continues the tradition of smart, twisted and entertaining plot. Here the paralyzed csi Lincoln Rhyme hunts a serial killer by analyzing hints and clues, much like in the tv-show but with more detail and excitement. There are almost 10 books in the series of Lincoln Rhyme and they are all very good.

I also want to highlight The Sleeping Doll which focuses on the human aspect of catching killers. Initially not a very appealing idea but this might be his best book of them all.

January 21, 2012

The results from Ludum Dare 22 are in! I made the game Sat-E for the 48 hour competition and I was quite happy with it.

#24 Community 3.71
This one was really surprising, but welcome. I did post a cute picture of a korean k-pop star so I guess that's why.

#40 Fun 3.38
Fun is always great! I'm so happy ^^

#49 Theme 3.69
I thought my theme choice (Wall-E in space) was good, seems like other thought that too.

#65 Overall 3.42
This is supposedly the "best" category to do well in so I'm glad. I did a lot better than I thought I would...

#95 Humor 2.82
Damned blast I should've focus more on the funny one-liners.

#167 Mood 2.92
If I make a better version of the game this is probably the one thing I would focus on. But that is a thought for another time.

#247 Innovation 2.69
Not very innovating I agree.

#338 Audio 2.23
No music = shit.

#340 Graphics 2.62
I guess I'm not that good of an artist, but tell me something I don't know!§

#376 Coolness 35%
The coolness factor = amount of games rated. I wasn't motivated at all sadly... I'm a game developer but I don't play much games? I'm so strange.

January 4, 2012

2011 in Review

It's time to wrap up the year that's been. Be warned for slight ego boosting here.

2011 Geek Achievements

1. Wrote three games this year:
   1. My-Minions
   2. Grand Thief Arto
   3. Sat-E
2. Bought a new computer!
3. Bought a mechanical keyboard.
4. Bought custom Starcraft 2 keycaps for the keyboard.
5. Learned 68k assembly.
6. Learned about algorithms and data structures.
7. Bought a lot of programming books.
   1. The Pragmatic Programmer
   2. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
   3. Introduction to Algorithms
   4. Modern Perl
   5. Effective Java
   6. Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!
   7. Land of Lisp
   8. Maybe something more...
8. Read a lot of programming books. Modern Perl and The Pragmatic Programmer were my favourites.
9. Learned some Ada.
10. Learned a lot of Perl.
11. Learned a tiny bit of Haskell.
12. Learned some emacs
13. Got a hint of design understanding thanks to Design for Hackers

2011 Non-Geek Achievements

1. Went to a dance course with Veronica.
2. My stumach is in good shape!
3. Read and loved A Song of Ice and Fire.
4. Achieved 7 kup in Taekwon-do.
5. Read a lot of manga. Some recommendations:
   1. Bakuman. A nice slice of life manga about... making manga. Surprisingly captivating.
   2. Gamaran. A slightly brutal battle manga with loads of weapons.
   3. Vinland Saga. A bit more brutal battle manga about vikings and war.
   4. Beelzebub. Battle manga but with a ton of light hearted humor.
   5. The Breaker. Another battle manga, a bit more direct perhaps.

2011 Failures

1. Didn't produce enough games.
2. Didn't write enough code.
3. Did not learn enough Haskell.
4. Have a lot of books I haven't read yet.
5. Did not have enough free time.

Plans for 2012

1. Keep Veronica happy!
2. Make more games.
3. Code more! Much more!
4. Blog more!
5. Learn more Haskell (yet again)...
6. Transform my site to something new, something that I don't dread to use.
7. Improve in Taekwon-do.
8. Be more disciplined in studying, coding, training and cleaning.
9. Read the programming books I have but have not read yet.
   1. A book about Erlang.
   2. K&R C Programming language.
   3. SICP, all important for every programmers. I hear.
   4. Probably missed something... Damn I've got many.
10. Get good results in school.
11. Try to be a bit more social (it's hard).
12. Get more free time somehow.
13. Complete a larger personal project.
14. Learn more mathematics.

December 28, 2011

Postmortem: Sat-E

This is my postmortem for my Ludum Dare 22 entry, Sat-E. You can find the timelapse over here.

The Good

Motivation
I was really motivated for this dare and it showed in the game and outside it. It's super hard to make a game in only 48 hours but this time it went pretty well. My previous attempts went okay, but there were always something lacking. This time the game feels a little bit more finished so I'm going in the right direction.

After the game the programming motivation continued and with it I've been improving my small fast prototyping framework I use when making games. I got a lot of ideas on improvements during the weekend so that's great.

The feedback
I was moderately happy with how the game turned out, it didn't contain everything I had envisioned after all, but I got a ton of positive feedback anyway which is wonderful! It seems like some thinks that my game is good and there's nothing better for your game making confidence than a bunch of flattering words. I'm even considering developing the game more, maybe spending a couple of days here and there on it during a couple of months when I have the time?

I learned a lot!
The best way to learn something is just to do and it's still true. I've found a bunch of ways to improve and shorten my code, I've made an "infinite" space constructed by individual chunks and that game physics != real physics. Awesome.

Game design is a pretty fascinating creature. Sometimes you give it your best but the resulting game isn't funny, other times you think your game is shit but then you get comments on your "amazing" game! This time I was certain the game was crap, a neat idea wrapped behind a boring gameplay but turns out it maybe wasn't that boring after all?

I got this comment:
"Also the fact that when that happened the game didn't simply reset, I lost my money but not my items, literally stopped me from rage quitting. Bravo"

My thougts? Wait that's a bug! Hmm...

My girlfriend
Of course as I live together with someone it's quite hard to devote an entire weekend, plus the extra time before and after, with my computer. Veronica handled it wonderfully well and she was very supportive which means a lot to me and it helped a ton.

The Bad

The music
There's no music but I had grand plans for making music for the first time ever! It failed hard though. Which brings me to the next point...

Not familiar with the tools
I used my own framework for the game, which is fine, but my last game with it was in May 2011! Which is a looong time ago. I was a bit (a lot) out of practice with this whole pixel arts thing. And of course I had never used LMMS to make music and that didn't happen. I was short of time and it was too big of a deal to start it with the last minute.

Not enough time
Even though I had the whole weekend planned for the dare and I skipped practice on Sunday I was still short on time. I'm not really sure why though. I made a pretty simple game, not a lot of art and I generated sound with bfxr which took no time at all... The reasons really must be:

1. Not enough practice.
2. Unfamiliarity with the tools. Correlates closely to #1.
3. I'm bad and LD is hard.

When I see all these amazing games I'm reminded on how much better other game makers are. I need more practice and I need to make more games. I should enter the next dare, enter the experimental gameplay project and just make more games.

And let's face it: Making a game in 48 hours is frickin hard.

The Ugly

The art
Oh god... I suck at making art. Let's just leave it at that.

The code
There's a lot of bad and wrong in there, it works but it's not pretty. In fact, it's ugly.

The gameplay
This is a tricky one. I thought about placing this in the bad section as I didn't find the game very pleasing at all. The beginning was too slow, the ending too long and there wasn't enough incentive to continue flying through endless space I thought. But I got a lot of positive comments and reactions which is wonderful! I don't fully understand why yet so I'm tagging the gameplay as ugly. After all the gameplay wasn't like in my dream...

Ending thoughts

Before entering the competition I'm always nervous but high spirited. That feeling is always crushed during the weekend and when I finally get the game done and uploaded I think it's the worst game ever. Luckily I'm greeted with positive feedback and that was the case this time again. Maybe they are okay, not super of course, but simply okay.

This time the dare came at a time where I felt I haven't done anything meaningful for a long time, it's just school, little programming and no game making. Now after my spirits are high and I can face a new year with many more games to come!

Until next time, cheers!

December 19, 2011

Ludum Dare 22 Timelapse

Here's the timelapse for my entry to Ludum Dare 22, Sat-E.

This time I managed to record one screen every minute, which is very suboptimal to say the least but I slowed it down a bit so you can at least see something being done there.

December 19, 2011

Sat-E

So I entered Ludum Dare 22 this weekend as a preamble for tomorrow's linear algebra exam. The theme this time around was Alone and the game I came up with is about a lonely satellite in space, kinda like Wall-E.

Sat-E

Download
Windows (2.1 MB)
Linux 64bit (4.7 MB)

Instructions
Collect junk and other items for you to buy upgrades, and finally, your friend to finish the game. Be careful not to run out of battery, you need to return home to base for a recharge between runs.

Controls
Arrow Keys - Move around
Space/Return - Choose item in docking mode
F1 - Developer console

Timelapse
It's on youtube and it's embedded here.

Source
https://github.com/treeman/Sat-E

Built using my fast prototyping framework
https://github.com/treeman/7days