No Time To Play

Software developers are willing to put up with a lot for the chance to earn a little money. (Hello, Web agencies!) This is most visible in the iPhone market, which has two very onerous barriers to entry:

1. you have to own a Mac and
2. you must pay a $99 developer fee just to test your own apps on the device you bought honestly.

Despite these obstacles, the official Apple app store has enjoyed a veritable gold rush (which, like in history, has benefitted few people, often not those who took risks and toiled). This may have something to do with the fact that many developers already own a Mac, and you can at least develop your app without asking for permission.

This is not a given, however.

(continue reading…)

One advantage of not being in the market for mainstream A-list games is that I’m sheltered from this sort of incident. In fact, I only heard about it more than ten days later, when another incident caused some people to remember the previous one. Which in turn promptly reminded me of yet another — unlike the others, this one did affect me.

It’s easy to call us alarmists when we rant and rave about the dangers of the “cloud”. But reality proves again and again that technology is inherently unreliable, and corporations doubly so. Whether you are a consumer or a service provider, depending on the continued availability of something that could go offline at the first storm or the whim of an executive (whichever comes first) is simply reckless. Never mind the issue of DRM; relying on a centralized source for anything at all pretty much misses the whole point of having an Internet.

Don’t get me wrong: a central meeting point has its uses. That’s why I still use identi.ca instead of setting up my own Status.net server. But at least I have the option. One day, Battle.net will go down, possibly for good, and a million Minecraft players will be all, “I told you so”. But then it will be too late.

Relying on the unreliable by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What’s the most low-tech computer game you can imagine? Rogue? Space War? Pong? Tennis for Two? Zork?

I vote for Hamurabi, a strategy game reduced to a dialogue between player and computer, where three numeric inputs is all you get. And yet it is remarkably immersive, not least because it requires serious thinking. That, and the evocative setting. Yes, evocative. You’re a king in ancient times, struggling to feed your people and grow the kingdom against various hardships. What more do you need?

See, that is the nature of text. A tiny bit of it goes a long way.

(continue reading…)

I learned a lesson these past few days.

Starting something on the Internet has become frighteningly easy.

You can create a Google Code project, or a Google group, or an Yahoo group in seconds. Or if you have your own hosting, you can set up any number of Web applications in minutes. WordPress, MediaWiki, you name it: with practice, you can do it essentially without thinking. All the infrastructure required to launch an open source project (or the next great Web empire) can be set up literally on a whim.

And therein lies the danger.

(continue reading…)

Sooo… I have good news and bad news. The good news is, I’m working on a new game. It’s too early to show you more than a screenshot, but it’s coming along nicely. What’s it about? Imagine a combination between Pac-Man and Robots, except with a few twists. It stayed in Limbo for a while, as I had the base game mechanic down, but no idea how to use it. Now I’m past that hurdle, it shouldn’t be long.

The bad news is, of course, that this post is late. You’d think that after four years and a half of blogging I’d know to prepare better. But nooo…

(continue reading…)

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses. — Bjarne Stroustrup

Nothing is perfect; certainly not programming languages. But it’s one thing to complain about legitimate issues, and another entirely to go by old misconceptions that could be cleared up with a little research. Due to its prominent status, C++ is often a victim of ignorance, as people think they know things about it just because they keep hearing the name. So let’s see a few things people believe about C++ that just aren’t true. This isn’t purely for fun: programming is hard, and the last thing you want is to limit your options artificially.

(continue reading…)

I like to brag about my work, for the simple reason that I like, well, my work. But it usually results in people taking me for a much better programmer than I am. Then again, that might have something to do with the decent number of completed personal projects on my website: working software, complete tutorials, playable games… Although they are small stuff (after all, there are people out there who write operating systems for fun), they obviously count as accomplishments.

Now, if even such limited success seems to elude you, you may think people like me have some secret ingredient. But all I have is a number of common sense rules derived from (sometimes bitter) experience.

(continue reading…)