Grammerjack

I've long-since misplaced the source code to my Atari 800 game Dandy Dungeon. But thanks to the Atari800MacX  emulator and the emulation scene, I've been able to play an emulated version of my original game. That's been helpful for remembering all the little details of gameplay. For example, I was able to determine that the original game animated the arrows at 15 Hz and the players and monsters at 7.5 Hz. FWIW I think the emulator may be slightly incorrect about the HBLANK processing emulation. I'm pretty sure that the color background for the 4th line of text should be a different color from the color background of the 3rd line of text. The iOS version of the game is progressing -- the dual thumbstick virtual controls work well. The next step (and it's a big one) is going to be multiplayer support. GameKit here I come.

There are a total of 3 draw calls and 2 textures in this scene: The whole tile map is rendered as a single draw call: a single 2-triangle tile that's instanced Row x Column times, using a 3D texture as a texture atlas. I originally used point sprites, but switched to instanced triangles because I wanted to use non-square tiles. The virtual joystick is rendered as two coarse triangle strip rings, using a 1D radial texture. Note the anti aliasing. (I could have used quads, but wanted to minimize overdraw.) So far Metal has been fairly straightforward to use, at least for someone like me coming from a DirectX 9 / Xbox 360 / Android OpenGL ES 2.0 background.

At my house we are trending towards having N+1 laptops for N people, because (a) I need to keep my work laptop separate from my home laptop, and (b) frequently everyone in the family wants to use their laptops at the same time . The same goes for tablets, and when the kids are old enough to have phones I expect it will be the same for phones. I tried using multi-user accounts on shared family tablets and laptops, but ended up assigning each kid their own devices. It was simpler from an account management point of view, and the kids like personalizing their devices with stickers and cases. Having assigned devices also makes it easier to give different Internet and gaming privileges to different kids, depending on age and maturity. A downside of assigned devices is that not all the devices have the same features. People complain about hand-me-down devices, as well as the perverse incentive created when an accidentally broken device is replaced by a brand new, better device...

When I started working on Android in 2007, I had never owned a mobile phone. When Andy Rubin heard this, he looked at me, grinned, and said "man, you're on the wrong project!" But actually, being late to mobile worked out well. In the early days of Android the daily build was rough. Our Sooner and G1 prototypes often wouldn't work reliably as phones, and that drove the other Android developers crazy. But since I was not yet relying on a mobile phone, it didn't bother me much. Seven years later, mobile's eaten the world . But I still haven't internalized what that means. I think I'm still too personal-computer-centric in my thinking and my planning. Here's some recent changes that I'm still trying to come to grips with: Android and iOS are the important client operating systems. The web is now a legacy system. Containerized Linux is the important server operating system. Everything else is legacy. OS X is the important programmer...

I've been reading Game Programming Patterns by Bob Nystrom. It's available to read online for free , as well as for purchase in a variety of formats. A good book for people who are writing a video game engine. I found myself agreeing with pretty much everything in this book. Note - this book is about internal software design. It's not about game design, or graphics, physics, audio, input, monetization strategies, etc. So you won't be able to write a hit video game after reading this book. But if you happen to be writing an engine for a video game, this book will help you write a better one. Edit -- and I've finished reading it. It was a quick read, but a good one. I consider myself an intermediate level game developer. I've written a few simple games and I've worked on several other games. (For example, I've ported Quake to many different computers over the years.) For me the most educational chapters were Game Loop  and  Component , although ...

It's been a while since my last post -- I've been posting inside the Google internal ecosystem, but haven't posted much publicly. What have I been up to in the past 3 years? Work Prototyped a Dart runtime for Android . Amusingly enough, this involved almost no Dart code. It was 90% Python coding (wrangling Gyp build system scripts) and 10% C++ coding (calling the Dart VM). Extended the Audio players for Google Play Music 's Web client. I learned ActionScript, the Closure dialect of JavaScript, and HTML5 Audio APIs (Web Audio and EME.) Started working on the  Google Play Music iOS client .  I learned Objective C, Swift, iOS and Sqlite. Personal Projects Prototyped a Go language runtime for Android. Unpublished, but luckily the  Go team is picking up the slack . Finished working on  Terminal Emulator for Android . I'm keeping it on life support, but no new features. Personal Life Started exercising again after a 10 year hiatus. It's good to ge...