Higher-Order Fun

Game Design & Game Programming

Category: articles

In Defence of Steam Greenlight

A few days ago, Steam’s already controversial service “Greenlight” (intended as a way to let the community decide which indie games are to be published by it) was surrounded by a true storm of controversy on Steam when they announced that all developers would be forced to pay a one-off US $100 fee before they […]

Math for Game Programmers 05 – Vector Cheat Sheet

This is the long due fifth article in this series. If you aren’t comfortable with vectors, you might want to take a look at the first four articles in this series before: Introduction, Vectors 101, Geometrical Representation of Vectors, Operations on Vectors. This cheat sheet will list several common geometrical problems found in games, and […]

The guide to implementing 2D platformers

Having previously been disappointed by the information available on the topic, this is my attempt at categorizing different ways to implement 2D platform games, list their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss some implementation details. The long-term goal is to make this an exhaustive and comprehensible guide to the implementation of 2D platform games. If you […]

On how Diablo III fails to live up to the Diablo legacy

[Edit: I’m now halfway through Act II, and everything I say stands – and, in fact, the problems have become even more obvious] Diablo III just got released this week, to a spectacularly catastrophic launch day in which almost nobody could play. But once the server loads normalized and the initial hype died out, a surge of […]

“Fourteen years were not enough” / “14 anos não foram o suficiente”

A while ago, there was a discussion in a mail group composed of members of the Brazilian videogame industry, regarding its perceived lack of progress when compared to many other countries – the case in point was that even Iran was showing more impressive results than us. I sent the following email, and since people […]

Programming is Art

Programming is a subject most often lumped in with engineering or science, and there are countless books dedicated to writing better code, but is this a good approach? To me, it seems much more reasonable to understand it as a form of art. Does it matter? Yes, I think it does. I believe that this […]

If programming languages were religions…

I originally wrote this article in December 15, 2008, and posted it on the Aegisub blog. I’m re-posting it here for archival purposes. — “If programming languages were religions” (Inspired by “If programming languages were cars“) C would be Judaism – it’s old and restrictive, but most of the world is familiar with its laws and […]