Lately I had too much time and wanted to entertain myself by making a small game. Coincidentally, the js13k 2019 game jam was about to start. It’s themed around games made for popular web browsers that would fit in 13 kB (after compressing to .zip file). Since I am not a fan of JavaScript I decided to explore a topic I was interested in for a long time. WebAssembly. What’s the state of it, how does it work and what can we expect from it by coding in C++?

Game development carries multiple issues about coding over all the years. I’ll cover some areas that game industry should explore to improve the craft.

While coding we meet sometimes one of our deamons: should I refactor what I see? When the dilemma grows it goes into: develop as it is or completely “rewrite” it?

In previous week I had to resign from using Kotlin in one of my game projects. By porting the code manually I can point out what I didn’t like about Kotlin. Let’s see few differences between Kotlin and Java.

Nullable type is a good thing. Until you prevent memory allocation to fight Garbage Collection pauses. I want to nullify lateinit variable - I can’t. Or can I?

Let me introduce you Artemis Entity Tracker - a tool to be used for game development in conjuction with artemis-odb (which covers architecture called Entity Component Systems).

Forget about Object-Oriented Programming. Look at this flat world built of small data chunks and separated logic. A world easy to refactor. Meet Entity Component Systems.

In January 20-22 I decided to attend Global Game Jam 2017. Among few other cities I choosed Kraków. The local event was named KrakJam 2017.

7th edition but my first attendance. Looks like I know how to pick events because this was another great one. I’ll cover the project, theme and my feelings around me being there, people and organization.

Unity3D seems to be a great software for rapid prototype development. It certainly is but when properly used. You’re alone with your prototype? It’s OK but I was the other case. When it comes to collaborate there’s a belief that nothing will change during the process of development. Well, the reality is that the teamwork does change a lot. If you dare to work with team using Unity, then you may find my experience useful to you.

In one of our games we needed to beautify user mouse or touch input. Actually it isn’t simple task since there can be found many criteria due to point reduce. I have tried several solutions like discovering big angle change between segments (built of last given input points), big distance discovering, Catmul-Rom curve approximation and even joining all of those methods.

Later on I have found Ramer-Douglas-Peucker algorithm which helped to reduce unneeded points in a more visually proper way. In the end I’ve been reducing points by small distance and little angle between segments to put less points into the algorithm. Since it had to be done in realtime that wasn’t enough of optimizations. Next optimization was to make the iterative version of Douglas-Peucker algorithm.

Unity3D is an often recommended game making tool for beginners, the same way, how it was with Game Maker and a few others. I have been stumbling upon Unity3D for 3 months and I do have my strong opinions about that fact.

My thesis is that Unity3D may not be suited for beginners. Some people argue and say that it is a matter of taste. I disagree. In my opinion it’s the matter of skills and facts. I would like to share some of my observations about Unity3D or actually how it can be misused. The following will not be an advanced take on the topic but rather a cover for beginning game developers who want to start with Unity.

I can see three following areas of (lacking) skills which often kill projects in later development:

1. writing production-ready code - maintainable for a longer time than a month
2. knowledge of differences between programming paradigms like OOP, GOC or ECS
3. performance problems awareness - due to target hardwarde, language and architecture

Let me explain.

As many Adobe Flash / AIR / AS3 projects we have been using Event Dispatcher. This concept seemed to be too uncontrollable and lacking of many wanted information. Doubts about garbage collector made us to recreate the idea to take more of control and information about event listeners.

Keywords: Garbage Collector Which Sucks, Event Dispatcher, Event Bus, Event Listener, Object Pool, Disposable Objects

Today many games need tutorial. Tutorial is a hot topic for discussion in indie games community. Anyhow, for programmer-non-designer tutorial implementation is just a job which comes with unwanted problems. Most of them appear because it tends to be made in the end of project. And worst situation is when tutorial is being done incrementally.

I will not discuss topic of tutorial design. Instead I’d like to present some notes about coding a tutorial in online game which are derived from my experience and observations. In the end I’ll give my advices for coding tutorials.

Documenting a project vision is justified in probably all of development methods and methodologies, like Agile/SCRUM, Waterfall, PRINCE2 or even Kanban. The idea of documenting is simple - we need to know what to develop. When vision of a new concept becomes to be a project, it’s always a good idea to document it. That’s what we are taught on universities, in companies or on trainings. But what are some objective reasons for doing that? Why not just start the project straight from a concept in the head?

There are 2 common choices of architecture for game network implementation:

1. client-server
2. peer-to-peer

What I did was some kind of hybrid of those two. I used Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs). In this post I will describe this technique giving some basic examples showing the role of server and actually giving it some tools to do it’s role as a server.

Some time ago I joined to some project developed since 3 months before by a 3-4 person team. After next 4 months I made a refactor request to modify whole engine and game to make game frame update based on the time, rather than device power. Yeah, there was a constant constraint set - maximum 30 Frames Per Second.

Many of world-existing mobile devices couldn’t achieve those constant 30 FPS-es. On the other side some devices could show 60 without a problem but couldn’t because of constraint.  It seemed crucial to me to change that. I have seen a game in previous company where 60 FPS were desired and some devices didn’t make 30-40. Those games felt totally too slow.

I was developing a whole animation system then but I’d like to describe one element of it all - keyframe-based animation which was a huge part, actually most crucial. I tried to look for solutions, even tried to look into Spine (which is a great software, I recommend it!) libgdx “runtime” which is open-sourced. Unfortunately, our needs were too wide.

I had pretty weak company computer in my recent job and also pretty old rubbish Windows installation. Because of that, duration of loading our Adobe AIR game was about 14 seconds. Colleagues had better times, like 11 seconds. I was curious if I could make it faster.

Every change in code made whole application recompile, restart and load again. I disliked it more and more, then a simple idea came to my mind:

if you don’t want to waste time on loading every time, then load it once!

Actually, why not. Easier said than done, right? Load whole data into RAM in another application and then send it through sockets to the application.

So I wrote simple application in C# which reads all files (graphics, sounds, etc.). I have also added new option of loading data to the game - through sockets. Result - came down from 14 seconds to 7 seconds! I could have done it earlier.

Context: game project.

class Card {
  var id:String;

  // ... some more fields and ctor setting the `id` field
}

class EmptyCard extends Card {
  public EmptyCard() {
    id = "";
    // and so on
  }
}

True story. Let’s refactor that.

Today we have simple question:

How to avoid abstract classes by giving base implementation?

The story

Once in a time I was building animation system which was planned to be used in IGWOCTISI project. It happened that I wanted to created some predefined tweens (animated translations) like ScaleTo, MoveTo, RotateBy and so on.

In the horizon appeared a requirement which was pretty straightforward:

public class MoveTo<T> : Animation<T>
		where T : ITransformable

The fact was that my type T not always was able to be some Transformable object.