DizzyDoo

51 ms·

1. 181.▲
   by DizzyDoo 8y ago

   A very good bit of marketing from Valve, I remember reading this when it was originally leaked (or 'leaked', depending on how cynical you want to be) and being quite impressed with what seemed like a developer paradise. Because in
2. 182.▲
   by DizzyDoo 8y ago

   For me, figuring out how to implement A* on a world was one of those programming milestones along the way of me grokking how software is put together. In fact, I see there's a Stack Overflow question from me still online with an implem
3. 183.▲
   by DizzyDoo 9y ago

   Thanks!
4. 184.▲
   by DizzyDoo 9y ago

   I started making video games as a teenager, and about ten years ago there was this golden age of Flash games where you could make a small video game, auction it off on a private website to various companies that ran Flash game arcades. You&
5. 185.▲
   by DizzyDoo 9y ago

   Oh, I absolutely agree! I'm definitely an early morning sort of person, and when you're a self-employed, self-directed programmer, that feeling in the day of 'getting going', digging into a good chunk of work with free h
6. 186.▲
   by DizzyDoo 9y ago

   I started my business with less than $1000. I worked a full-time job and built my first video game product ( http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900/The_Cat_Machine/ ) by waking up earlier in the morning to ge
7. 187.▲
   by DizzyDoo 9y ago

   Voronoi diagrams are used a lot in game development too, in creating and recalculating navmeshes in games where the navigation graph changes often. I have a game project underway right now where the player can build fences, lampposts and ot
8. 188.▲
   by DizzyDoo 10y ago

   Hah, well, thank you. My academic training is all in Computer Science, but I've enjoyed drawing since I was a kid. Still feel like such a beginner in that whole realm, been teaching myself animation and design and 3D modelling in the l
9. 189.▲
   by DizzyDoo 10y ago

   Audio is the only thing I don't do myself! I do the programming, art, writing and game design (and marketing/business stuff) but the audio side of things would be severely detrimental if I had to do that bit too. The music is done
10. 190.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    Honestly, not very much. I'm incorporated in the UK, which involves a 15 minute filling in of a web form to accomplish. I have an accountant who really helped me in the early days walk through some things I needed to know (normal stuff
11. 191.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    I finished my side project a couple of years ago, released it, and then found I was able to quit my Python webdev job and go full time making video games. The key difference is that my project was a video game (this one: https://
12. 192.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    Sure, I totally understand that! My advice is just to work on a really, really small project. Something that you could finish in a couple weeks, then you can bounce to the next thing with no guilt.
13. 193.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    Thanks! Yeah, it's easier than ever to get started, and easier than ever to sell your work online, so now's a great time to get involved.
14. 194.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    I got started writing video games at University in England, when there was a thriving marketplace for games written in Flash, and websites would buy licenses (sometimes exclusive ones) to have your game on their site, this is back in '
15. 195.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    Thanks! I certainly have considered translating it, but at this stage I believe it's too late to be worth it. Not only is there the cost of translators, but in this instance there is an engineering cost as I made the classic mistake of
16. 196.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    The easy way is to write it at a higher level, and let the abstraction handle the meat of it for you. The easiest way is just to use an engine, an existing array of tools and frameworks that manages the abstraction in such a manner that (fo
17. 197.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    I do, I run a small video games company, making games that one person can make, like this one: http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900 . I've posted about it here once before, but my 'thing' (if I have a
18. 198.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    As I sell mainly on Steam, Steam handles the updating, it works out the diff and updates the files that have changed.
19. 199.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    Oh man, Spine is amazing. The latest 3.0 release has some great new scale features, and the fact that you can browse all the runtimes on github and submit patches is just the best. And the community is great too, lots of support on the foru
20. 200.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    That's exactly how I do things. I'm very glad that by distributing digitally, it's incredibly easy to roll out small fixes that are applied as incremental patches, so I don't tend to 'save up' for major updates
21. 201.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    Not at all. Unity is the engine I use, these engines are immensely valuable to developers like me, I can't invest years into building my own stable core right now, and although it has its rough edges and problems, it suits my projects
22. 202.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    I'm making video games for PC, Mac and Linux (like this one - http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900 ), it's a very traditional release cycle, I work on a project for x months, and then I release it, moving
23. 203.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    I released on Steam, and Steam's been great. Since I just developed the game by myself, I only needed to sell a couple thousand copies to break even, and that happened fairly quickly. Releasing on my site ( http://cranktrain.
24. 204.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    I did indeed. Not the best process in the world, but I was only there a week.
25. 205.▲
    by DizzyDoo 10y ago

    I don't have a story about enterprise sales, but if you'll allow me I will just slip in the story of the first copy of software that I sold. I hope no one minds. I wrote a silly computer game about cats ( http://store.st
26. 206.▲
    When a Self-Declared Genius Asks You to Read His Masterpiece(lithub.com)

    188 points by DizzyDoo 11y ago|110 comments
27. 207.▲
    by DizzyDoo 11y ago

    Full credit to my friend Peter Nickalls ( http://www.peternickalls.com ), who composes music for TV shows that are far more impressive than my little game. The soundtrack he did for the game is fantastic, I'm glad we put toge
28. 208.▲
    by DizzyDoo 11y ago

    I made in just under 4 months of work, came from an idea I had at University when studying those classic finite state machine diagrams, where you effectively have to draw state machine diagrams that process a regex-like set of rules. I real
29. 209.▲
    by DizzyDoo 11y ago

    I released a small computer puzzle game based on finite state automata called The Cat Machine[0] back in August, which still steadily sells copies, accompanied with bigger spikes when a Steam sale comes around. From what I hear, the 'l
30. 210.▲
    by DizzyDoo 11y ago

    For the game I have on Steam[1], a logical puzzle game, this just isn't the case. Mac sales are at about 10%, and Linux sales are at ~3%. However, the most outspoken fans of the game, and the ones from whom I get the most nice emails f