Rubber Ducking?

It's been a while since I've made a blog post, and I don't have anything major to post about right now, so I figured I'd toss up something light and interesting. Apparently there is a development / debugging technique known as Rubber Ducking. The idea that we as developers should keep a rubber duck by our desks at all times to help us get through debugging strange bugs and ironing out the kinks in our systems. What's funny is that I am of the opinion that this might actually be a good practice... rubber duckies for everyone!

nVidia's new Parallel Nsight

This is quite possibly one of the most awesome things I have seen recently. nVidia, someone needs to bake you a tray of cookies. In short, nVidia unveiled their feature-rich graphics debugging tools for Visual Studio. I'm not even going to try to go over it here, just follow this link.

It Starts...

I set a personal goal recently to get a least one post up per month, so ready or not, here it goes! While the title screen may not make for a very impressive screenshot, there has been a fair bit of coding going on in the background. Well, as much as is possible when you have no real free time to speak of anyway. Of particular note, the GUI system has been rewritten to have a cleaner and more user-friendly interface and, as you may be able to tell from this post's screenshot, the "Bounce!" project has been started. Unfortunately, after getting a good ways into the project I learned that there is already another indie game with the title "Bounce" so I will need to come up with a different name before too much longer.

The game will basically be a 3D remake of my old Pong-type game from back in college, featuring a variety of characters batting a shiny glowing orb back and forth while moving around on hovering platforms. I intend to add a few new game concepts to spice things up a little, and ultimately I'd like to give this tiny little game a very high level of polish. This might actually even involve paying an artist or two to replace my horrible programmer art! I still don't have tons of time to devote to the project, but I am excited that things are moving forward, slowly but surely.

Font Builder - Part II

Yay, a new update! I'm not exactly at liberty to say why I don't have any free time these days, but suffice it to say that I literally get about 20-30 mins per week to attribute to continuing to move things forward. Not much, but slow progress is still progress! Between the last update and now I have reworked the font tool a bit. You can now add custom ranges to a font palette with full unicode support. Again, FreeType is awesome for helping me not have to manually decode fonts, I highly recommend it to anyone finding themselves needing to render fonts in a bitmapped fashion.

Writing this tool had the desired effect of helping me to find and fix some bugs with my font system, and now I should be in a good position to begin moving forward on actual game-related tech. Inching forward day by day, I will get this project finished no matter how little free-time I have to do it!