Gamedev

There’s a rise in the popularity of cozy games, the ones that are not about just hard challenges, combat or adrenaline, but about comfort and attempt of well-being. Those are great, and it’s incredible to see the indie scene doing many interesting things in that department. But I always have this on the back on my mind as one of my favourite things, one thing I’m usually very interested in, cozy feelings/atmosphere that can be found in unexpected places. ...

🕛 2024 I initially intended to do a “end of year” post BEFORE the EOY talking about some stuff, but that never happened because work and other things kept getting in the way. 2024 was a weird year, from work, to personal, to world, to finances, to game dev, to everything really. I just feel tired honestly, that’s the best way I can describe 2024! Ok that started in a weird way, but allow me some latitude here… The world is in a weird state, economy, layoffs everywhere, the game dev industry in a very fragile state; and suddenly every company is betting all their chips on “AAAAeee IIIIII”, politics seem wacko, climate change, social networks going bananas, overall everyone trying to find their feet. ...

🧵 origin thread In 2018 I started a thread on Twitter (later renamed X 🙄) where I shared some game development tricks devs used to get around bugs, software, hardware and/or time constraints. Later I kept adding more posts to that thread, and there’s some cool information there. But because I now went through the process of replicating that thread on both Mastodon and Bluesky; it got me thinking, I should probably put this on my own blog, a single post, which is easier to read, also in case those websites are ever gone. If I find more I’ll add them later. This page may take a bit to load due to images, gifs videos etc. ...

📝 It’s been 10 years It’s around 11 a.m. as start to type this. 10 years ago at this hour, I was at my day job, trying to focus and not be distracted by the fact that later that day, at around 18h, Quest of Dungeons was being released on Steam and iOS. For the first time, players around the world could try it. I was quite anxious about this; it had been a few years in the making, mostly nights and weekends. I had little idea of what to expect, but being on Steam was simultaneously exciting and terrifying. What if people hated it? ...

I use SDL 1.2 on my engine, but just for the window creation and input handling. That prevents me for writing boring window handling code for each platform, it just works. These days SDL can be use on almost every platform, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android. They recently launched the a new version, SDL 2.0 and I was lucky to receive a copy of SDL Game Development written by Shaun Mitchell that covers that new version. ...