One year blogging!

How time flies!

Last Thursday marked my first full year of running this blog. I still haven’t figured out where this blog is going, having been inspired by a number of different sources, such as the Brainy Gamer, Japanmanship, Lost Garden, GameProducer.net, and more. In dramatic contrast to their wonderful work, the things I write seem quite short. In the next year, I hope to explore and define the direction I’m going with this blog more, but I believe that the trend of short posts will continue.

In the interest of remaining brief and to the point, I also decided to try out Twitter. Again, nothing fancy there yet, but as I continue to learn nuggets of game design wisdom you may see them appear there.

I had another thing I wanted to talk about, but as it’s somewhat unrelated and I’d like to start posting more often, I’ll write that up seperately and post it later…

CC-Licensed Pixel-Art for Your Games

I’ve been trying my hand at coding SDL recently, and needed some pretty pixel graphics to use for test programs. Considering the hours put into making these, it doesn’t do much good for them to just sit on my hard drive so here they are for you to use!

They are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution & Share-Alike license, which I hope should let you use them for most programs.

Download Link (14.6 KB)

Depending on what I need for future SDL tests and the sort of interest there is in this art, there may future additions.

Setting build options in Geany

For a while now I’ve been using Geany for code-editing and then compiling at the command-line with g++. This was because I didn’t care to setup a “build environment” or whatever you call it within Geany so the right dependencies would be included.

Well, a little looking around just revealed a menu item under Build called “Set Includes and Arguments”. Yeah, I know: Why didn’t I see this before?

A couple minutes of work, and I can now code and compile all within Geany. Quite convenient.

Open-Source funding survey

This might be a very good survey to check out. The questionnaire, created by Andrew Fenn, is designed to find out about your opinions on open-source software and how it gets funded. All that’s asked of you personally is your age.

I heard about it from here, and Andrew Fenn’s blog (where the results will be published) is here.

Testing, testing, never resting.

Hello, everyone. I’m just testing a little Ubuntu application for posting to wordpress blogs called (appropriately) Blog Entry Poster.

Just to make this post somewhat useful, here’s the conclusion I came to about something I was thinking about today:

The extent to which games will have a rigid method of creation is inversely proportionate to the amount that games are an art form.

Let me explain that a little bit. I’ve been working hard on a personal programming project, so I’ve been thinking a lot about how much to plan ahead and how much to leave until I have to deal with it. Being mostly an artist, the obvious analogy appeared between games as an art form and drawing/painting. Again, let me explain a little…

When you set out to create a drawing, you have a general idea of where you’re going, but often once your idea gets on paper you have to make alterations and adjustments so that it can be the best drawing possible. Initial ideas don’t always account for certain aspects that can negate them.

In terms of game design, this means that while we may know approximately what sort of game we want to make (and may even make plans on that assumption), we need to be open to things changing throughout the course of production.

Anyway, places to go and things to do. Hope this little blurb has sparked some thought (and will post to wordpress correctly).

Later!