mikedesu d0t com

===[[[ The Mikeflow: a guide for aspiring game developers -OR- anyone, really ]]]===

0. This is an algorithmic abstraction of my own work process. For the last year I have been working on an iOS game. My whole life, I have been working on becoming a game developer. Last night, I entered self-declared beta development phase. It took 26 years, 4 months, 2 weeks, from birth to beta. Here is how I did it without giving you the long history:

0a. You’re reading this list from top to bottom, or “highest priority to lowest priority”, so you should do things in this order, or through these filters (depending on if you’re linear/non-linear brained):

1. Trust your feelings / thoughts / instincts by exploring them. If it isn’t fun, stop doing it immediately and re-filter through this list

2. Immerse yourself in the becoming process by assuming you already are.

3. Give your unconscious mind time to integrate new experience by spending time away from the becoming process by assuming you are not and perhaps never have been / never will (but do not trick yourself into thinking this is actually true).

4. When your experience reaches a critical point, your gains become negligible and you must take on bigger challenges to continue leveling up.

5. Find a suitable farming location for your level

6. Speed through the game’s story elements as quickly as you can but try to find players you can level with

7. Get the gear you need for your class and level. Make sure you have your inventory stocked up

8. Institute a system to chart as many variables as you care about optimizing. Attempt to optimize the logging system itself to extend to N-variables -BUT- be able to show how optimizing a variable is beneficial.

9. Start grinding. Get into a good flow. Take a food/piss/gaming/exercise/sleep break regularly.

10. Layer other activities/processes on top of this one so that you can sync progress with one project to another so that nothing gets left out.

11. Don’t do too many things at once. Balance. Remember the rule of 3

Warning: naughty language

Awakening to reality, I find myself approximately 18 days from submitting a 25,000+ line Objective-C iOS “app” to Apple for inspection and selling on their “App Store”. I’ve been working on it solidly for about one year now. I’m exhausted, but excited! I’m not “done” by a long shot, but once it’s submitted and approved, I can rest a bit easier and take a short vacation.

I actually love coding in Objective-C. At first, I thought “wtf, this shit is gay”. The syntax is ugly if you grew up learning C and Java. But, it’s a small price to pay for how awesome this makes your program’s syntax look overall. You can almost literally read your program like a story book if written properly. It makes figuring out wtf is going on all the easier because of shit like:

[thisShit isGay];
[thisShit isGay:YES butIsAlsoAwesomeAsFuck:YES];

Secondly, the other night, I discovered you can pretty much instantiate objects with an arbitrary identifier like javascript’s “var” keyword, which is unusual to me for a C-language. Example:

NSObject *anObject; //normally you declare object-pointers, right? Check this next shit out...
id alsoAnObject; //oh my mother fucking GOD that makes shit so much easier!!!

“but mike…how do we know it’s the same type?”

WE DONT!!!

Well, not right away. This is “duck-typing”, which is the bees-knees for speed-coding and doing just bullshit crazy-awesomeness. As the programmer, you should be naming your shit properly, so if you do, then you should also know the methods available to an object at a given time. Just attempt to call a method and see if the object responds to it. Worst-case, you can actually return the class of the object and check it.

id thisShit;
thisShit = [[Shit alloc] init];
[thisShit isSoCool]; //ex1 - works because isSoCool is a method of class Shit
[thisShit wontWorkBecauseUndefinedOrSomeShit]; //ex2 - crashes because undefined method


Anyway…also, third thing: I discovered you can do this same shit with functions like in functional languages…WHAT??? That is some craziness. Just look:

(void)(^foo)(void) = ^() {
//code goes here;
}

foo();
if (isThisAwesome())
NSLog(@"This is awesome");


This has extremely awesome implications for functional programming in a C-like language. Too bad I’m not better versed in C++…template metaprogramming could possibly be hybridized here. But god, what a nightmare to maintain…

Occam’s razor wins again. Which is why I still love Objective-C. Simplicity. And power. And win.

In other news, working out regularly, eating awesome food all the time, recently went to see Andrew W.K. live and got to crowdsurf and rock out on stage with him, that was beyond words. I want to party as hard as him! I also got to see Descendants of Erdrick up in Austin, which was amazing. And I got to take a new friend with me, which was really fucking cool. She’s been playing chess with me, and kicking my ass at it! But also inspiring me to actually learn the game and not-suck at it for once. I’ve been enjoying it more than video games lately (even tho I still primarily play it on an electronic device of some sort…)

Also finished Seinfeld. That was a long-time coming.

Recently, I began watching Destroy All Software Screencasts.

Setting up Command-T on Mac OSX Lion

1. Compile/install a version of vim with Ruby support (Ruby must be installed, obviously)
2. Download the Command-T install script: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3025
3. Open the script in vim and source it
vim command-t.vba
:so %


4. Compile the C-extension
cd ~/.vim/ruby/command-t
ruby extconf.rb
make


I forget if there were any other steps…but if you’re at this point in your training, you’ll have to do stuff on your own anyway so hopefully I’ve power-leveled you a bit

5. In your .vimrc, add the following

let mapleader = "`"
cnoremap %% <C-R>=expand('%:h').'/'<cr>

map <leader>w :CommandTFlush<cr>\|:CommandT<cr>
map <leader>e :CommandTFlush<cr>\|:CommandT %%<cr>

nnoremap <leader><leader> <c-^>

Using this setup

I have only been using it for about a day but already I feel pretty comfortable. From within vim, to open a file…

`e{typepartialnameoffilepathhere}

where {typepartialnameoffilepathhere} is a series of substrings of your filepath.

For example, if you were in directory /home/mike and you want to open file /home/mike/Documents/source-control/project/file.c, you would type something like…

`edocsopf

That weirdness stands for /home/mike/Documents/source-control/project/file.c. But, in other words, you can very quickly open files, provided you already know where they are.

Now, something else. Suppose you’ve opened a 2nd file, and you want to return to the previous one.

``

That two-key quickpress will immediately open the previous file (provided you have saved any changed to the current one).

More to come

I’m getting back into my vim groove. I can leave XCode4 open and code in vim if I want now…XCode automatically indexes/updates any files I change. Sucks I have to rely on it to actually test the app but…maybe I can figure out how to write tests without having to run the app?

All I know is vim is fucking powerful and I’ve missed using it badly.

This is the reason I make games

Just get the game

To get the most recent version of the rpgsandbox, download and unzip this file:

http://www.mikedesu.com/rpgsandbox.zip

Then, in the bin folder, double-click/run the GameApplet.jar file. You may need to click/drag resize the window (I haven’t figured out how to set that option yet)

Git the source

I’ve made my budding RPG engine available via source code. You need to be using “git”, so, get it for your system, make a new directory, go into it via the console/terminal/whatever, and then clone the rpgsandbox repository. On Mac OSX and Linux, it looks like this:

git clone http://www.mikedesu.com/rpgsandbox.git

In order to run the game, go into the “rpgsandbox/bin” directory and run (either from the commandline or double-clicking on the file) the “GameApplet.jar” file.

java GameApplet

After having some problems thinking how to handle new things like camera panning and animation and scripting, I decided to scrap the first engine and go from scratch again. Here are my results so far, in maybe 2 days / 10-12 hours work:

You can tell by the way I use my walk that I'm a woman's man, no time to talk

So yeah…things are going better this time around. I need to get entity scripting in so I can actually tell the entities to “sit”, rather than them deciding to sit on their own. Then I can make them move randomly. I’ve been very thorough with the menu systems so I can have an easier time creating the game, period. Ultimately, I’m playing the game in debug mode, so I need tons of “hidden” features unavailable on the normal game…

I’ll post more as I get more features accomplished. This one doesn’t seem in danger of stopping anytime soon