April 10, 2010

Widening the horizon

This is a game making site but where are the games? What gives?

I've been slightly less motivated in making games lately and I've been doing different things, just to get my ideas and my motivation up. As I said in an earlier post I wanted a break from Experimental Games and I want to spend more time on each game just to get the quality of the games up.

Lately I've been using vim and I really like it but the learning curve is really high, so why not make a game about it? To make the learning progress easier and hopefully even somewhat fun. I haven't come up with a great idea yet, and thus I haven't started, but I'm pretty optimistic.

I also mentioned Ludum Dare but as the looks of things it ain't gonna happen this time. I've got a massage course the whole weekend timed on just as the 48 hour game making competition is and I don't think I wanna stress myself to manage the both of them.

Instead for a game I've been focusing on learning Haskell and on improving this site. Trying out different stuff like trying a new paradigm and trying out different languages is a really good way of Sharpening your Saw. Yes technically he meant doing things not related to programming, such as math, but I still see it as doing something completely different and improving while doing that.

For example Kohana, the framework this site is built on, has made me think more about tools and frameworks instead of just language features as it transformed my awful, hackish site into this beautiful little thing literally in the blink of an eye. Or take jQuery which took my epic cross-browser checks and transformed it into beautiful code. These two seemingly small changes made the boring web developer process really fun!

Yeah that's what I've been doing; I've been widening my horizon and I've been having fun at the process! Wooo

January 24, 2010

Why is my file so huge?

My latest game was absolutely huge! And I'm not talking about the music (which was pretty huge too - roughly 20mb) but the little .exe file.

It was 14,6mb!!

Now every way you look at it, that's incredibly huge. It's like comparing an ant to a human. Normally the little ant is the exe file which should be small, except that it's not.

Incredible I thought, what the heck did I do wrong? I mean my code isn't really good but I never knew it was this horrible. So today I was determined to find the cause of this obscene mutant ant.

I started out chopping off everything regarding exceptions, cause all c++ resources I've read say exceptions will take space like a mutant gremlin. Okay I thought and chopped away everything - but nothing happened.

Now that's weird, what happens if I scrap this.. and this.. It ended with me beginning a big revamp of my whole "engine", or rather collection of stuff - nothing inherently wrong as it was badly needed - but nothing happened with my exe file! It was still almost 2mb big with basically only a hello world...

Then it struck me! I had been using -g with gcc and without any optimizing at all. When I turned on size and speed optimizations and scrapped the debugging the change was quite extraordinary.

The mutant 14 637 kb was magically transformed to a more fitting ant size of 856 kb. I couldn't save much of the total file size (23 254 kb -> 20 768 kb) so while I apologize for hogging your bandwidth, time and harddrive space I'm hoping you won't be too mad at me.

September 28, 2009

Why make games

Why did I start making games? Because I like to play them of course. Think of all the fantastic games; Super Mario, Lemmings, Tetris, GTA, The Sims, Counterstrike, Theme Hospital, SimCity and Rollercoaster Tycoon... Damn - when you count them like this you'll see how many great games there are out there. And I can honestly say each and every one of them has inspired me and made me wanna create something similar. No - something even better!

I also like to program, that's almost a must if you should make a working game from scratch, so I figured why not use it to make something productive and hopefully something fun?