What exactly is the difference between a library, a framework and an engine? These terms get tossed around, sometimes interchangeably, which can obfuscate some of the fundamental technology we use when developing a game. Today’s brief article strives to clarify the relationship between these three important terms. Continue Reading »

There are situations where it makes sense to code like a banshee. Perhaps you have a deadline in six hours, or you are prototyping some code that you’re going to throw away before starting on the final implementation. In these types of situations, you generally will hurt your progress by over engineering the task before you. Generally speaking, though, these are the exceptions not the norm. As you work on larger and larger projects that interface with more and more people, you will find that adapting certain fundamental approaches to software engineering will reinforce your project’s viability over the long term. In really massive projects, you’ll often find yourself going back to code you wrote over a year ago. With the right development habits in place, doing that should be as easy as if you’d written the code last week. Like consistent coding conventions, using the single responsibility principle is another step along the path to improving your development habit and writing maintainable code. Continue Reading »

“Design patterns” is probably the most used software engineering buzz word out there. This article will give a basic introduction into the concept of software design patterns, describe some of the design patterns that are most useful in game development, and point out some of the challenges when using design patterns. Continue Reading »

One of the most valuable tools available to a game developer is a reliable version control system. A good version control solution can be the cornerstone of any development environment, but especially so with a distributed team, like we have at Urbansquall. Getting a reliable version control system in place is one of the most important steps to supporting effortless development and is crucial for any team based development. In this article, we’ll explore some of the benefits of source control, and how best to leverage this to move us closer to effortless game development. Continue Reading »

An informal survey of some of my Flash programmer buddies revealed what I’m sure you’ll agree is the most silly programmer error that we’ve all made at some point in our lives (usually many times over). It is such a trivially silly mistake that I managed to successfully do it on two different projects this year. By highlighting it here I am trying to reinforce it to the point that I never do it again. My name is Panayoti Haritatos, and I like to convert Strings into Booleans. Continue Reading »

Now is a great time to be an ActionScript programmer! Over the last few years, several tools have emerged as essential to developing for the Flash platform, and the great news is that many of these tools are free. As of June 8th, 2008, these 10 FREE tools are the ones I consider the most essential for any ActionScript programmer. Continue Reading »

Making a preloader is the epitome of game development suck as far as I am concerned. Usually you are implementing them at the end of the development schedule when you are are sick and tired of looking at this game that you have spent so much time on already. Now you have to figure out how to massage all your assets magically across a few frames for people with slow internet connections when all you want to do is kick the darn thing out the door and be done with it. There are umptillion tutorials out there on how to create a preloader in the Flash IDE. Flex has a pretty snazzy built in preloader. Are we screwed because we’re going with a pure Actionscript 3.0 project? As it turns out, you can get a customizable AS3 only preloader with almost no effort at all. Continue Reading »

Flash 8 marked the introduction of the scale9grid. UI writing was about to become substantially easier, because you could create components that resized dynamically and maintained their artistic integrity at all sizes. This was to usher in a new era of sexy UIs that were built in less time. In theory. In practice, the implementation was, and still is, buggy. Oh, and it only works for MovieClips. You can kinda get it working in Flex using yet another embed tag you’ll forget about as soon as you’re done copy pasting it from some reference site. Here’s a scale9 implementation that actually works. Continue Reading »

Very few games can escape the need for an Entity framework. An Entity framework defines the core pieces of interactivity for your game. Over the years, I have implemented and reimplemented Entity frameworks dozens of times. In the interests of easing the development process and providing stable libraries on which to rapidly build games (rather than simply create technology), I introduce the following Entity framework that will become the foundation of more advanced topics in game engine development. Continue Reading »