Keeping the streak going

I should go into the archives to see if this is true, but I’m pretty sure this blog has had one post a month since its inception. I have nothing much to talk about this month, but by Reorx’s beard I am not breaking the streak now!

As one bit of semi-noteworthy news, I’m attending MIT Reality Hack next month. Never been to this event before, hope it’s interesting.

AR news: Porting Demolo, Giving Talk

I have two bits of news relating to my work with augmented reality: I’m giving a talk about AR in Unity, and I’m gearing up to port Demolo to AR headsets.

Texturing the Procedural Dungeon

I’ve been putting a lot of thought into the textures for my dungeon crawler. This is a screen recording showing one of the possibilities I’m exploring:

Game development quotes

Years ago I wrote down in my notes a great quote about game development. It was something said by Jerry Holkins, one of the co-creators of the comic, back when the first Penny Arcade game was coming out. The quote was great and that’s why I noted it down, but like a dummy I didn’t keep the source where I saw it. Well with the help of people online, I finally tracked it down!

Here’s a photo of the article (or rather, his sidebar to a longer article) in the August 2008 edition of Game Developer magazine:

What happens when you Google my name

The latest updates to my game still aren’t visual (eg. systems-level stuff) so for this month’s blog post I’m just gonna tell you about an amusing thing I was reminded of recently. If you search Google for my name, you see my photo with a death date of 1937:

Common Interface for Actor Objects

This month there isn’t really anything visual that’s changed with my turn-based dungeon crawler. Instead, this past month has been a lot of invisible structural work. For example, there hadn’t been any way to complete a dungeon and start a new one, so I added in an end location to reach. Meanwhile, I’ve also been doing a lot of refactorings and code cleanup, one of which I want to highlight in this post.

Specifically, I created an interface for the various interactive objects to share. While it’s not where I learned of this programming construct, the following video is a pretty good explanation of what I did:

WIP Random Monsters, Combat, and Loot

Last month I showed off grid-based movement in a randomly generated dungeon, but now I’ve added the beginnings of combat, the beginnings of loot/treasure, and (most crucially) randomly generated monster sprites! Here are screenshots of the enemies taken from different play sessions:

Grid-based movement for both Player and Enemies

Last month I had implemented dungeon generation for my first-person roguelike/RPG game, but it wasn’t populated yet, nor could you move around it. Well, I’ve since programmed that stuff.

Two additions: BSP dungeons and A* pathfinding

As I blogged about a couple months ago, I’m writing a little RPG for a fun hobby project. I was inspired by this twitter thread about a random monster generator, and I designed a tabletop rule system to use. Since then I’ve been implementing things in Unity, and this month I want to talk about the first two things I programmed: procedural dungeon generation, and grid-based A* (or A-star) pathfinding.

Post-GDC Recap

I was at GDC last week! Qualcomm sent me to help staff their booth. I wrote some of the demos after all, so I could answer questions about the demos. I met a ton of people there, with several people standing out as especially notable/unexpected. I already tweeted about these encounters, so I’ll just post those tweets: