Technicat

Topic

GameDev

Game development

HyperBowl Scripts

I've been telling HyperBowl users I'm no longer working on the Unity version of the game, and to show I'm serious, I just placed the HyperBowl Unity scripts on github, in a repo that already contained a bunch of general-purpose scripts (also used by HyperBowl) which may or may not

Hyper Concepts

As part of my licensing arrangement for HyperBowl, I got my hands on some of the old concept videos for followup games. Some are missing, including some possible new HyperBowl lanes like a toy lane, bowling on ice with penguins, and a downhill motocross lane (my favorite - I added

The Game Localization Handbook

I see there’s a newer edition of this book. Here’s a review of the first edition that I wrote on Epinions, so it’s a bit dated (with reference to hardware). As video games become more respectable(?), an increasing number of books, magazines and web sites offer to

Smart Mobs

My first Epinions book review, of Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs, written back in 2003 (the bit about wireless games and wireless internet not working out yet is a bit dated). And I did visit Hachiko’s statue afterwards. This book made me laugh, it made me cry. And it

Slay the Dragon!

I got around to reading Slay the Dragon! Writing Great Video Games a while ago because I’m interested in writing, I work in game development, I met one of the authors when he was a producer at Crave Games and I worked on a game and later consulted for

It's Cheap, So Why Not

Catching up on the Steam reviews for HyperBowl, the latest ones are pretty good. I don't know if the one about removing the bowling game part and just rolling around is serious, but I really did consider that, or variations (like rolling through a credits screen). One constraint is that

Behind Deep Blue

I’ve never been a particularly good chess player — when I played on my high school chess team, my rating peaked at just above 1700, which is, well, decent. But ever since I played and lost to my first chess computer, I’ve aspired to writing a great chess program.

Translation Spam

It's not a good look when a translation service spams you in the wrong language (although it's good reading practice for me). This outfit is named Mars Translation (free translation - 火星 is Mars, literally "fire star"). They've been spamming me for years, probably harvested my Google Play developer email

Why We Sleep

Ironically, I found Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep a bit of a snooze. It's one of those books that took me a long time to finish because I kept nodding off every couple of pages. It's partly because it cites study after study, which sounds good for science, but also,

Wikipedia

My latest distraction was a three-day wikipedia editing binge. It's addictive: you see something to fix, then see some interesting related articles which also have items you can fix, and so on...kind of like coding. For example, I started out editing the article on the Salt Lake City Chinatown,