Higher-Order Fun

Game Design & Game Programming

Global Game Jam 2011 – Planetary Plan C

Last weekend, the Global Game Jam 2011 was held all over the world, attracting some 6500 people into a challenge to develop a game with the theme of “extinction” in a mere 48 hours. I was joined by six incredibly talented people (and a few other friends who were supporting us) to make Planetary Plan […]

Understanding the Game Main Loop

Video games are simply ordinary software – there’s nothing intrinsically special about them. However, they SEEM to behave in a very different way from your ordinary everyday applications – so much that many experienced programmers are at a complete loss when faced with the task of developing a game from scratch. This difference is mostly […]

Math for Game Programmers 04 – Operations on vectors

Last time, we introduced vectors, and hopefully that introduction alone would be compelling reason to use vectors where it makes sense to. This time, we’ll discuss common operations associated with vectors, and their many uses. All of these operations are commonly found in vector operation libraries. Length Like we’ve discussed on the previous post, the […]

Math for game programmers 03 – Geometrical representation of vectors

In the previous post, we introduced vectors, and showed some very elementary uses for them. We presented them as a simple and convenient way to pack a number (3, in our case) of scalar values into a single object. Now, we’ll consider their geometrical representation, which will help you grasp them more intuitively. For simplification’s […]

Math for game programmers 02 – Vectors 101

If you don’t already use vectors (and I mean vectors in the MATHEMATICAL sense, not in the “dynamic array” sense that languages like C++ or Java use), this is probably going to be the single most useful piece of math you can learn for writing games. It’s easy, efficient, and makes your code much shorter. […]

Math for game programmers 01 – Introduction

Here comes a harsh fact of life: game programming requires mathematics. One could say that programming IS, in a way, math, but you don’t really need to know math to write the vast majority of programs. Most of the time, you don’t need it to write parsers, to interact with databases, to validate data. Games, […]

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Hello, my name is Rodrigo Monteiro, and this is my shining, brand-new blog. I have been a hobbist game designer and programmer for over a decade now, and have recently moved into the realm of professional game development. I am also creator of the “Aegisub” subtitling program, which is the de facto standard for anime […]