Category: Game Development
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AI is Overhyped
I’ve been in the job market for a couple of months now, and I’m finding it incredibly frustrating how much this industry overhypes this technology. It’s basically all LinkedIn is these days. It even seems like there are major swaths of the industry that are demanding that their employees and the world at large mirror their excitement that seems to grow more and more detached from reality by the day. I’ve been keeping the policy of just shutting up and keeping my frustrations and opinions to myself, but I think I do actually have some things of value to say…
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Happy Birthday Freddie
Happy (belated) birthday, to one of my greatest inspirations: Freddie Mercury. September 5th of 2026, Freddie would have celebrated his 80th birthday, and no doubt a great number of fans did that in his stead in Casino Barrière in Montreux Switzerland this year. I regret that I wasn’t there for it this time. My dad and I got the honor of being there at his 70th birthday party in 2016. We landed the day of the party, and so we were pretty jetlagged for the whole event, but it was still a beautiful moment, and the trip as a whole…
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Sargasso: A Realtime WebGL2 Ocean Topography Simulation
Embedded above is something I’ve been working on over the past couple of months that I thought people might find pretty interesting to play with. This is a WebGL2 simulation of the topography of an ocean simulated via Gerstner waves, rendered entirely on the GPU. My project is called Sargasso and the source code can be found on Codeberg (and on GitHub if you prefer). The initial idea that got me interested in building this was that I needed a way to play with the very complex parameters for Gertner wave simulations to try to create realistic and interesting ocean…
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Becalmed
Anybody who has known me for any of the last six or so years should know that Sea of Thieves is perhaps my favorite video game of my life. Minecraft held that position for a long time, but during those lonely years just after the pandemic began, Sea of Thieves took a very special place in my heart. Hell, it’s obviously a huge inspiration for the game I’m making even now. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it was a huge part of my current dream to live near the ocean someday. For those who haven’t played Sea…
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Going Upon the Account
“Going upon the account” is what it was called when people people decided to embark on the dangerous journey of joining up with a pirate crew during the Golden Age of Piracy. Most of those who did it had been experienced sailors who had been successful privateers or soldiers during the wars that preceded the era, but found themselves unemployed and cast off without much in the way of a soft landing. Merchant captains were notoriously brutal and paid very poorly, and some decided they’d rather live a short life, and a merry one. Well we’re in a rough economy…
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The Problem with Geography-Based Pay
Some remote companies such as Atlassian have begun altering their pay structure to pay workers different amounts depending on the geographic region where employees live. No doubt the company leadership responsible for such decisions has correctly determined that the cost of living is not the same everywhere, and has naively assumed that the way to address this imbalanced cost of living is simply to pay people more who live in higher cost areas. However, I’d like to make the case that this “solution” solves one issue and introduces several others in the process, arguably resulting in a worse outcome for…
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Why I Will Always Choose Firefox
Unlike most people who may be reading this, when I install a browser, it’s always Firefox. Being a software developer, and working around other tech-literate people, this simple fact seems to draw a fair bit of confusion, as everybody else seems to think of Google Chrome as their go-to option. I’ve had a great many friends over the years try to convince me to switch to Chrome, usually, I presume, as an instinctive aversion to difference, and once because they wanted to prank me by installing the NCage chrome extension. On that last occasion, I installed it just to see…
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HyperTrace 1.0 – My First Android Development Experience
This week, my company Danger Interactive LLC launched its first app, one for which all of the programming and art was done by myself, so in a sense, I launched my first app. Learn more about that here, by the way: https://dangerzonegames.com/apps/hypertrace/ Experience My preexisting experience with android development was very limited prior to developing this app. I had followed a tutorial one time over five years prior, before I even understood programming well. On another occasion, I planned to build an app for a friend, but once again, this was before my understanding of programming was sound enough to…
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Ludum Dare 41 Postmortem
Ludum Dare 41 came to an end just a little more than a week ago. I believe I’ve finally recovered from the mayhem and come through the better in the end. Project Status Unfortunately, my Ludum Dare 41 project, a “turn-based AI battle-royale game” called “Turn-by-Turn Deathmatch” was not finished when the 72-hour deadline hit. This was, unfortunately, my expectation for this one. I may continue working on the game in the future, but I am particularly averse to the theme and not satisfied with the idea that I was able to come up with. The Theme My struggle for…
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The Scourge of Global Mutable State
I’m not a perfect programmer, but I like to think that I’m getting better every day. I’ll admit that one of the things that I’ve had the most difficult time adapting to was what I perceived as other programmers being somewhat pedantic about avoiding what they called “global state” or sometimes more specifically “global mutable state.” In the past, I held onto some conviction that while this is something to be avoided where possible, there are actually cases where it is appropriate. Recently I’ve decided to not only better conform to this well-known best-practice, but also to understand why it…