It's Taxes

Well, not completely off the grid. But next week is my anniversary, and we’re heading off to Disney World for the week, so I’ll be ignoring the Internet for the most part and definitely not writing any code.

After that, I have to head off to sunny Anaheim for BlizzCon 2016! Sadly I won’t be enjoying it the same way the fans do; I’ll be spending most of my time locked up in a war room learning the ropes on BlizzCon.com operations. Keeping the lights on when so many fans are excitedly hitting the web site is a big task.

Good luck without me. I’ll be back before too long.

I haven’t been able to do as much coding as I would like on Critterbits this week (busy with real life stuff). All I added was a little feature for creating timers and callbacks in the scripting engine. So instead I spent some time this weekend on some much-needed documentation. Even with just a few small features in the engine, I realized I kept having to refer back to my code to remember what I called certain configuration keys and scripting conventions, so I decided it was about time to write some documentation that I was going to need anyways.

This is probably one of my number one peeves with lots of projects (both open source and not). Documentation is usually an afterthought to the point that once someone decides its important, the project is so far along that catching up becomes a hopeless task. For something like a highly configurable/scriptable game engine like Critterbits, documentation is especially important, otherwise the whole project is kind of useless for other people to get into.

In order to save time in programming my game engine, I’m relying heavily on third party libraries and tools. Probably my biggest dependency is the Tiled map editor. Tiled is an open source project and is an extremely powerful tool for creating tile-based maps. It also has an open file standard that many people have written libraries for.

As with all things, I have to start somewhere. I decided to make this blog so that, among other things, I could chronicle my development of a custom game engine (and a game to go along with it) that I call Critterbits. I might also talk about some other things from time to time as the mood strikes me.

I first started the Critterbits project in earnest back in August, though to be fair the idea for it goes back a couple years. Over that time, I’ve learned a few different engines and even some raw OpenGL programming to prepare for this. I even used Unity3D professionally for a while. One thing I learned through that process is that while all the available free engines I looked at were certainly handy for jumping right in and getting started, they were way overkill for the kind of game I wanted to make. I wanted to do something simple, and I felt like all the tools and bells and whistles just kept getting in the way.