I love guard clauses and conditions. Simply put, a “guard” in programming is something that checks that inputs are as expected. If they are not, the code either fails or defaults to some predefined result. I want to argue that
Don’t Pad Your Comments
So I met this comment the other day†: †anonymized and exaggerated for entertainment purposes
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/// <summary> /// The purpose of an objective highlighter is to highlight the relevant objectives. /// </summary> public class ObjectiveHighlighter { |
Don’t write comments like this. Let’s break this down: “The purpose of an objective highlighter is to highlight the relevant objectives.” First off, we are
Requesting Features Is Hard
There are a million blog posts about vague client requirements… and this is one of them. As a designer, this is the design or spec document that you want to give your programmer: Of course, that’s the ideal scenario
Don’t Break the State Machine!
Designing finite state machines requires good discipline and a shift in design paradigm. It’s very easy to “break” a state machine by implementing improper design. It is very tempting to take shortcuts, but it never leads to clean lasting code.
Technical Debt and Delivery Times
Today, I want to muse on how new code features take ever-so-longer, specifically, how increasing delivery times are the symptoms of bad code. I’ll focus primarily on recognizing the issue (rather than avoiding or solving it). The Mystery of Increasing
Braille – Ludum Dare Jam entry
I participated in Ludum Dare again and this time with Phil as artist (our entry). The theme was “alone”, which lends itself nicely to all kinds of depressing, scary, atmospheric games. Then again, everyone was doing one. So we made
Soul Hellscape – Ludum Dare 48 entry
As promised, I entered Ludum Dare 48-hour game making competition and submitted my game, called “Soul Hellscape” (entry here). In this sandboxy game you help trapped souls by placing your “Holy Light” beam that attracts them and lets you guide
Wow! I haven’t posted for a long time
I really have not posted anything with content for a while now. WordPress even managed to roll out a few updates in the meantime slightly changing the whole interface. I also got about 100 spam comments. I’m still here, still
Physical resource gathering in video games
I want to observe and discuss resources as they appear in real-time strategy (RTS) and similar video games. Specifically, I am interested in collectable (harvestable, gatherable, acquirable) resources and their implementation from the gameplay perspective. It does not matter if
Blog (re)Launch
I have been meaning to upgrade my Blog for quite some time now; and I have finally done so. I switched from my own code to a WordPress blog framework. After some time playing with themes, CSS, and source files,