Well my friends, let me tell you – what an eventful time it has been. As we all stumble into 2023, hopefully by now no longer hungover I hope you have all had a successful year. Quick catch up on what I've been doing while AFK from here:
- I got in. Not as a game dev, but as a software engineer. I hav…
Hello GameDevs. I've been AFK from almost everything internet for the last several months. Gamedev.net, Facebook, Netflix, Chess.com, Warcraft, crypto, bank accounts, everything. Just didn't have time. I am happy to say the reason why I didn't have that time was that I was changing jobs. After fini…
I have definitely solved the display issue.
My hunch about letting the GameScreen know what the current GL origin is was correct. SRP does not I think mean that the gamescreen should exclusively deal with Skia coordinates. It would in fact be quite useless to me if it did. My work around up un…
Single Responsibility Principle
In OOP, SRP states that a class should have one and only one responsibility. Sounds simple, but in practice it can get complicated. In the engine so far I have struggled to keep game logic and graphics logic isolated. This has many benefits - I could for example chang…
Hey everyone, just wanted to give a quick update. First, thank you to the reviewer who gave this blog 5 stars. That really does mean a lot and it genuinely brightened my day.
For the last several months I have been acclimating to the new job. I guess this should be a no-brainer but sometimes in 2021…
The good first: it turns out that although Microsoft says Windows 10 Home Edition doesn't support Hyper-Visor, there are still ways to install it. They just hide the Hyper-V tools unless you buy Professional Edition. Luckily (please don't read this and take revenge on me Microsoft), the Android vir…
I am pleased to say that I've started a new position. I believe this is going to bring some balance back to my life and ultimately be a good thing for my projects, including this one. My career was pretty badly stuck before, but I've got a foot forward now and a direction to keep pushing in and tha…
It's been a long week.
The SSD arrived. I cloned both OS' to it, set up a dedicated swap partition and now boot into Windows or Linux in a matter of < 10 seconds. This feels like an entirely different machine, better than when I bought it in late 2015. The old hard drive is now a shared dat…
The Good
So as we can see, quite a lot has improved. For one thing I've found that my Windows install didn't have enough virtual memory. Normally Windows is able to handle this dynamically, but in this case it was doing so poorly. I added a swap partition = 1.5x physical memory (~23 gb) and removed …
I have improved the stability of my dev environment. The windows partition needed to be a bit bigger because honestly Windows and everything that installs to it is huge. But because of the primitive way Windows 10 handles OS partition resizing I had to free up adjacent space on the disk before I co…
It has been a long road, and it may not be much to look at but this to me represents a lot of progress. Behind the scenes of this brief clip,
an instance of the Controller class has had its controlStatus linked to the controlStatus of Actors[0], which is player 1 or Bob in this case. A change in tha…
Welcome back everyone.
I've decided to make some changes with this blog, and with myself. I've realized that the most important factor working against this project wasn't any external difficulty in my personal life, although there's plenty of those - it was my attitude and unhealthy outlook. O…
I'm still not at a point where I can devote time to this project, but I am making it easier for myself when I do get the time. I've got some dedicated space set up in the garage to work now, so I no longer have to rearrange my desk or suffer the noise and disruption of the living room or walk all t…
Welcome back to Creating Valkyrie, and thanks for everyone that follows this blog, as it passed 25,000 views this week. Posting here is helpful to me to vent during the stress of the creative process and hopefully it helps some of you in your own struggles as well. Whatever your reason for followin…
Today I took the time to catch up on documentation. As an electrician, you live or die by it. In the Navy one of my many duties included updating it. I know it is hard work, but I also know that you or someone will always thank yourself for doing that work. Part of what decides how long a piece of …
Welcome back to Creating Valkyrie.
I've hit a bit of a rut - but I view this as a good thing. When this engine was still an academic assignment, I scrambled to get any kind of control system working. Eventually I hard-coded the virtual soft-keys like the D-Pad and A and B buttons to control th…
Welcome back to Creating Valkyrie.
I've hit a bit of a rut - but I view this as a good thing. When this engine was still an academic assignment, I scrambled to get any kind of control system working. Eventually I hard-coded the virtual soft-keys like the D-Pad and A and B buttons to control th…
Meet Bob
Bob is a Zombie. Bob now appears on screen. This may not sound like much of an accomplishment, but it took a bit of work to make this happen. I am happy to report that I am now getting the hang of adding things like Bob to this engine. Bob starts life as a tag in an XML file cont…
And we're back.
It seems all I needed was to take a break from this for a while and deal with.. you know.. having coronavirus. This has not been an easy week for me, and the only way I got through it was some good luck and cutting everything except rest and survival out of my schedule. Feeling…
Look guys I'll keep things real
this project is on hold.
There's nothing wrong with it, I know how I want to proceed and I'd be excited to do it but time is a scarce resource and at this stage in my life, with the demanding job I'm juggling there are extraordinary demands on it. Working a…
Welcome back followers to Making Valkyrie. I've got a lot to go over, so much that I'm actually going to have to split this up into 2 parts. I am as we speak stuck on a classic 90/90 situation – 90% of your code takes 10% of your time, but the remaining 10% of code gets you stuck so bad that you sp…
Hello followers welcome to part 2 of my developer story as I work to bring a 2D game engine to life.
Today I wanted to write to you about how props work in a Valkyrie project, but I've been side-tracked by a different issue – positioning props, obstacles and sprites correctly on-screen. I got …
Hello and welcome to the first post documenting my developer journey as I create a 2D game engine. This project started out as my final assignment in a Certificate IV in Programming. I've completed the Cert IV and have started my job search, but that's taking time and I need to keep improving my sk…
