Despite their peaceful appearance, game developers actually lead thrilling lives! Here are three things I learned (or re-learned) about yesterday that I'd like to share with you, in the form of assumptions that revealed false.

As an obsessive-compulsive, bipolar, perfectionist game dev, getting your game to run smoothly on all kinds of operating systems, graphics cards, and drivers combination is something of a holy grail. Many look for it, but let's be honest here, it never really turns out as expected.

Update: Lestac is now available in Early Access on itch.io! Read more on the official page

So, Lestac is out! Ain't that something? For those who don't know, it's Sylvain and I's entry for Ludum Dare 28, a video game jam that happens every four months.

Here's how it looks:

You can play it now if you haven't yet - it's available for Linux, OS/X, and Windows. And then you can come back and read this postmortem if you will!

It's too easy! Where's the documentation for the API? I found an injection vulnerability! Global functions from 'window' leak! I tried to attack your server then realized nginx was ignoring me!

Keep struggling, my pretties. The game is not meant for you, but you are good guinea pigs nonetheless. Just because the game involved programming, you found yourself so, so terribly wrong about one thing: that you understood at all what was happening.

Damian Sommer did a casual AMA on Reddit recently, about his upcoming game, The Yawhg. I got to ask him a few questions. Here's what he had to say.

"I was just kind of tired of them. There's still one more platformer I really want to finish, (The Clown Who Wanted Everything), but besides that, I'm just extremely bored of them now."

"Some people don't understand the iterative nature of art, design and game design."

"Instead, they try to reach the final version on the first try and get frustrated when it's not as good as they thought."

"Aim for the best you can, but know that you will have to iterate, work on it again. Know that it'll get better on the next step!"

"The best way to learn is to just go out and make stuff, collaborate with people who are better than you at different things, and experiment."

"That's what I've found, at least. Just be around people who are awesome and learn off them. Trade ideas around and try stuff."

"Everything I do, I've learned from friends, collaborators, people I look up to, and personal experiments. Just going out and trying stuff."

Haven't blogged in a while. Life's fine, project are a-plenty, but I just wanted to make a more lasting post about one particular issue that struck me as funny when programming Paper Isaac.

What's infuriating when letting others play an early prototype is that you hear constantly the same things. Some bugs are non-trivial to fix, some you're just not motivated to fix now... sometimes you just have your head elsewhere, gotta focus, or are elbow-deep in some other piece of code and the damn walls can wait.

While looking to write a pure ooc version of ftgl, I was reading the source of ftgl-gl3 and I stumbled upon this piece of code:

static inline GLuint NextPowerOf2(GLuint in)
{
     in -= 1;

     in |= in >> 16;
     in |= in >> 8;
     in |= in >> 4;
     in |= in >> 2;
     in |= in >> 1;

     return in + 1;
}