A Seven-Day-Roguelike, as the name would suggest, is a complete roguelike game created in no more than seven days.
The 7DRL Challenge has turned into an annual event and this year the contest is running between March 8th and March 16th - I’ve been thinking very hard if I wish to enter or not, you’re allowed […]

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I spent the morning creating a random name generator which will be added to the ‘create character’ section of Caverns of Underkeep.
I’ll explain how it works in a minute. But for now, here is an example list of names:

Yivha
Ilhalo
Xagloh
Pojlo
Xifei
Coxfo
Cedtiz
Digja
Emrapo
Aygoh
Omgez

So not bad, sorta could be real-made-up fantasy character names maybe. This is how the algorithm […]

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My roguelike game Caverns of Underkeep is coming along rather swimmingly and I’m confident I’ll get the game to version 1.0 before March 2008 - Which is when I’m due back at University.
I’ve been taking a bit of time to think about the next game I want to make. A week ago I made a […]

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I’ve been working on algorithms for randomly generating dungeons.
My current project Caverns of Underkeep is a Roguelike, and one of the features of all roguelikes is that they are randomly generated. I’ve currently got two flavors of generation. I’ll briefly explain how they work here, but I really want to write a much longer article […]

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My newest project is a Java Applet game (still hush hush on the details tho…) and I thought I’d share a nice little tip for securing a java applet so that it can only be run from within your webpage and not from anybody elses.
This is particularly useful if you don’t want others to profit […]

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I’m a big fan of reading post-mortems on game development. If that sounds somewhat morbid to you, a post-mortem is basically a post-production overview of what went right and what went wrong. And any insights gained after the product has shipped out the door. Whether your product was an amazing success or an absolute bomb, […]

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Yesterday I attended a seminar given by Microsoft Student Representitives. I forget their official title, but basicly they go around to Universities and show off Microsoft technology - evangelists maybe?
The topic was on XNA game development.
Usual presentation technology hickups aside (like trying to access the internet through the universities firewall via a wireless laptop connection […]

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In my earlier post Is Crossplatform Development just a Myth? I mentioned the difficulty of creating truly cross-platform games. (And when we’re talking just Apple and Windows here, one could argue to what degree is that cross-platform anyway?) And I just covered a few api’s and programming languages. What I didn’t mention was game engines. […]

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I’ve been experimenting with a couple of different APIs/languages so I can become more informed when it’s time to choose my Apple/Windows cross-platform strategy. And I’ve come to the conclusion that there really is no such thing as a truely cross-platform API.
One of the chief selling points of Java is that it’s supposed to be […]

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More correctly what programming languages am *I* going to learn.
The domain of software development is huge and it’s next to impossible to learn everything. It’s even more impossible (if such a thing is possible to be more than impossible) to become a master at everything. In fact, the domain is so huge that its impossible […]

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