Link: Two’s Complement

Link: Two’s Complement

You wanna know what always used to break my brain back in school? Two’s complement. For those of you unversed in nerd geek, i’s the computer’s way of interpreting negative and positive binary numbers by using the left-most bit as the sign.

Examples:

Lets talk in nybbles here (4 bits instead of 8). In a perfect unsigned world, the number 15 is expressed as 1111 in binary. However, speaking in signs, this is -1.

Link: Higher-Order Fun

Higher-Order Fun

Higher-Order Fun

So, my blog’s concept is nothing new: Games, programming, tutorials, the works. But everyone’s a little different and post up different content, and recently I found this blog, by Rodrigo Monteiro, where he not only posts up tutorials, game design, and even 3D game math, but he also gives his 2 cents on games and game design ideas. It’s a real great blog, and definitely one to bookmark. Here, I have a few pages of interest for you:

• Math for Game Programmers 05 – Vector Cheat Sheet
• The guide to implementing 2D platformers
• On how Diablo III fails to live up to the Diablo legacy
• Religion in MMOs: Proposal of an Experiment
• Multi-thread OpenGL texture loading
• Understanding the Game Main Loop

 

Guess Who’s Back!

Wow! Man, have I been neglectful! So much crazy stuff has been happening lately! I left my job, got a new job, left that job, and went back to my old job, and I’ve been running all around this crazy state. But now, I’m back, and I’m going to try to provide more updates and more answers to your comments! First, news:

• I added the game made during the last Global Game Jam: Silence On The Line. Make your way through a haunted submarine and try to escape while avoiding massive heart failure.
• I’m working on an actual legit game that will be my ticket to the Indy Game scene. Lots of development is getting punched in, and more is to be done. I plan on launching a Kickstarter for this one, so, yeah, things are getting pretty serious.

So, there you go! I’ll be around, posting the usual snippets and whatever else I got going on! Take care, guys! Good to be back!

Link to the Path: A* Pathfinding for Beginners

A* Pathfinding for Beginners

OK, so a while back I posted a link for a simple implementation for A* Pathfinding for C/C++. The page gets a bunch of hits, but I get a lot of people asking me to explain it. Well, it’s not my code to really explain, and I haven’t tested it out for myself. Rather than go through and make a huge tutorial, I figured I’d take the lazy route, and provide you with a resource to help explain it a bit. This page breaks down A*Pathfinding to the basics and gives a great explanation down to even the heuristics (If you don’t know that word, you’ll need this link).

So, now with this in hand, pathfinding should be easier to grasp now. Give it another go, and let me know how it turns out! Good luck!

Related articles

• A* Pathfinding in C# (daniweb.com)
• C# Circle Pathfinding (stackoverflow.com)
• The basics of pathfinding – animated example (emanueleferonato.com)
• Artificial Intelligence (unrealengine.com)

>450 Hits in <2 Days!?!?

Holy crap! Yesterday this blog racked up over 350 hits! To most bloggers, that’s probably not much. To me, who normally ranges about 30 – 80 hits a day, THAT’S FREAKIN’ NUTS.

What’s creepy about all this is ~59% of all the hits where all on my Indie Game: Slender post.And the hits are still coming in – it’s not even noon (EST) yet, and we’re up to 122 hits. Wow.

Update! At final tally, for Sept. 27th & 28th, 27th had 354 hits, and 28th had a whopping 527, totaling 881 hits in 48 hours. Damn. I gotta check that Slender page to make sure no one’s hid anything provocative in it.

So, I like having people visit my page and judge my work (anxiety), and I wanna keep the hits rolling. So should I keep posting about Indie Games and do little reviews about them? Or should I just write about stuff happening in pop culture, which Slender: The Eight Pages has worked itself into? Post some comments, let me know.

BUT WAIT! THAT’S NOT ALL!!!

I’ve worked with a small Indie group called QuadraTron Games a couple times now, and I’m friends with a lot of the guys. My friend Zenas Bellace has started a Kickstarter for his game, Monsters! He’s working with some great people (Travis Carter (Art), Shawn Pierre (Music), Nicole Kline (Story)) and if you guys and gals could, lend the Indie devs a bone and donate! You won’t be disappoint!

Related articles

• I Love “Indie” Games and You Should Too (thegreybackpack.com)
• Awite Guvner! Get Yer Indie Games ‘Ere: IndieGameStand (rockpapershotgun.com)
• Slender Is Getting A Sequel With Better Graphics, More Scares [Slender] (kotaku.com)
• Indie Game: Slender (keithmaggio.wordpress.com)
• IndieGameStand open for business, pay what you want for Escape Goat (joystiq.com)

Unity 3D – Super Simple Animation System (SSAS)

One thing I always considered good practice is “If you know what you need, and ‘the wheel’ is over-bloated, it’s OK to reinvent.” I looked at animation systems involving many awesome features, but I wanted something really, really simple. Named after my room mate, here is the Super Simple Animation System (SSAS).

Update: New Game Up, the Slender Review, and Keith News!

I finally stopped procrastinating, and put up Chernobyl Playground! Go play it! Now! NOW!

Also, in the post below this one, I did a review on the game Slender. Go check it out, and if you haven’t played it…

if(HaveNotPlayed("Slender"))
{
     if(IsDarkInHere() == true)
     {
          printf("Dude, seriously. Don't play this game. It will scare the piss out of you. Don't do it.");
     }
     else
     {
          printf("Play it, but stay away from tall people.");
     }
}

I’ve been on a horror trip lately with games, and I’ve added some horror elements to the game I’m working on now. Once I get a decent prototype up, I’ll post it up.

So go off and play Chernobyl Playground and Slender, and I’ll get back with new updates to… stuff.

Take care!