This article at gamasutra covers some interesting stuff (memory usage, fragmentation ...).
It's not for the faint of heart, but for those wanting to delve deep into the inner workings of their application, this is a great way to do it.

This should be in every game platform SDK ... or in every game developers toolkit.
Maybe one day we'll get there.

After reading this post from Jamie Fristrom, and agreeing to most of what he was saying, I decided to read the article that originated his post.


This article by Greg Costikyan nails it down perfectly. If you are interested in game design, you should really read this.

I recently played a lot of Super Mario Galaxy, and this makes perfect sense. I was not really interested in the story, what kept me wanting to play more was just having fun and seeing what they would think of for the next level.
The game reinvented itself at almost every new galaxy I found...
I don't think it needs to be infinite (it was big enough!), it just needs to be fun.


But truth be told, I never really dedicated myself to playing RPGs (I did play a few) so one might argue I don't know what I'm missing ...

I had this article in my google reader starred items for over one year ... and for a good reason.
The different way of thinking to successfully exploit concurrency fascinates me.
In this article Kristian starts by comparing software state variables to moving parts in hardware. They might seem to be working ok, but chances are they will be the first ones to fail. Ok, it makes sense to me ...
The suggested solution is not easy to accept (as an efficient solution), basically because it is a different paradigm (functional programming) than most of us are used to.
As an alternative, for when mutating data is a must, he suggests using the active object pattern. I like that ;)
In the end, I see his solution as a trade of memory for computing speed (the oldest trick in the book?) Anyway, it's a nice point of view, and I would like to give it a shot ... when I get my hands on something with more than 4 cores ;)

This article at gamasutra is a very nice introduction to agile (specifically eXtreme Programming).

I am trying some of the techniques described there even though I'm not (professionally) working in an agile project (we're getting there...).

Some of the topics that got my attention:
Test Driven Development (I'm a sucker for this ;) )
Pair Programming (great Idea, bad for my last.fm stats ... )
Continuous Design (because it just makes sense)
...

When writing my previous post, I was thinking of lamba expressions in C++0x simply as syntactic sugar, a nicer way to express what I wanted to do, without the need to constantly create helper functors.

In this post, Dean Michael Berris talks about a nice way to exploit lambda expressions and take advantage of the high level you are writing code at.
If you consider intel's TBB, and think of how they implement it, having built in support for lambda expressions in C++ is a great way to allow the compiler to decide how parallel the execution should be.
This is a nice example of just how big the implications of a new language revision might be. And why they should be well though out before releasing them.

This post by Herb Sutter on his blog says it all.

C++0x is really shaping up with lots of new interesting features ;)

About Herb's teaser in his post. I wonder if he used gcc for his tests... That would be fun. And still, not that inconceivable ;)

The use of the lambda expressions to pass code around to another thread is really interesting. I really like the active object pattern, but this is surely a great way of distributing work around.

This article at gamasutra
really got me all pumped up again about this project.
I left it go back to a dark spot on the back of my mind ... all forgotten due to other issues that just would not let me focus on this. I guess Mr. Maslow would have something to say about this ...

Anyway, this is a great article focusing on what makes us want to play a video game, again and again. The most basic ingredient that sadly is forgotten too many times in both old and new games.

Game Feel.



How well do you identify with your avatar. How natural does it feel to control it. Do you get a feeling of immersiveness while playing ? Do you end up reacting instinctively to the gameplay without hours of practice to get used to the cumbersome controls ? Do the game's control just feel right ?
Ooh immersiveness, this has been a big buzzword on games lately, but like with all buzzwords, it's how you implement it that matters, not just checking the it of some checklist.

I especially like Mr. Miyamoto's idea of having a test "garden" where he experiments with how the game feels at a very early stage in development.