Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? In the time since the last dev diary, we’ve gotten jobs, passed exams (and gotten into the third year of our course), gone to a few conferences and the like, and spent a lot of time, to be honest, not working on the Flax Engine. This is our apology.
Continue reading ‘Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary Part 10′
The other day on my long train ride from my home and college, I had an idea. I was sick of my fear of missing my stop whenever I was in a train (or even worse, on a bus, because Irish towns look identical), and I thought that it would be handy to have an app that would alarm you when you were near your destination. Then, I proceeded to make it (it’s here if you want to skip reading the post – switch off auto-lock on your phone first). Continue reading ‘An App In Under Five Hours’
Let me start this article the same way I started my previous article about this topic: don’t autoplay audio. Autoplaying audio is the worst thing on the web and nobody will visit your site if you play audio without permission. It’s a bad, bad thing and people will hate you for it. Your dog will run away and your best friend will kick you in the face.
Continue reading ‘How to get hidden, autoplaying HTML5 audio on iOS (now with added hackiness!)’
So myself, Ciarán and James Kelly (who we’ll hope you’ll be seeing more of shortly) went to the Tipperary IT Games Fleadh yesterday. It started off as a small Robocode competition a few years ago, and has evolved into a three-day event, with representation from Irish game dev companies like Havok, DemonWare, and PlayFirst. Continue reading ‘Tipperary Games Fleadh – Ireland’s GDC’
So the other day month, I posted a programming problem from the ACM inter-collegiate programming competition that I did last year. Here’s my plain-English solution (with some code too). And yes. It is three months late.
Continue reading ‘Solution to the ACM Programming Problem 1′
This is a post about the psychology and art of games, and we’ll return to your regularly scheduled programming blog shortly.
In almost every game I’ve played, there has been a force of evil. In fact, an overwhelming majority of not just games, but films and books, and stories that we tell our children, and legends of gods and demons, have a simple premise: good versus bad. Humans versus aliens. Allies versus axis. Good people versus bad people.
Now, this goes deep into our roots. Those who share our moral views are with us, they’re the good side. Those who don’t are bad people, the bad side. An over-simplified look at things? Well, bear with me.
So myself and Ciarán (and some other classmates, Kevin Beirne and Keith Cully) are in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest at University College Cork this year. We’d competed last year, but we were so unprepared that we didn’t even bring pen and paper. It was a spur of the moment thing (to drive halfway across the country and compete in a programming competition is a spur-of-the-moment decision for us, oh yes).
Continue reading ‘Two-hour ACM Programming Problem, the first’
