game development and casual madness

Do you know that famous Game Designer Peter Molydeux? No, not Molyneux, silly. The oher one. He’s constantly posting game design ideas on Twitter. Most of them appear to be some kind of hilarious intellectual fall-out, but in all this crazyness, there is a creative genius hidden somewhere. If you haven’t yet, you should definitely read his tweets. Doing so for quite a while now has inspired me to write down some thoughts myself. I’d love to experiment with them, but it seems like I’m pretty occupied with Duality now, so I guess the best thing I can still do is share them. Read more

Three months and countless caffeinated drinks later, it’s finally done: My bachelor thesis has been graded and I’m back to normal life again. Since a large portion of my thesis deals with the inner workings and design descisions of Duality, it might be worth reading for anyone who is interested in the project. You can read it here. Only available in german, though.

So.. yeah… um… you come here often? Read more

We’ve been making a lot of progress, even in the long uncared-for hardware department. That’s a good thing, since we’ll reach the project deadline on wednesday. Time for more pictures!

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In case you wondered what the lack of updates could mean: I’m not really working on Duality right now. There’s just too much stuff I need to take care of first. Here, I’ll leave you a postcard.

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D’oh. No time for Duality. No time for Deck13. ‘All busy learning several forms of stuff.

How have you been? I’ve been reeeaally busy being dead playing Portal 2. It’s a great game. You should go buy it. Now.

Though, the singleplayer mode is played through in around 6 hours, so there was also some time left for Dualitor development. While there’s still a lot of stuff in a “Well, it works” state it’s finally possible to play around with content. You can take a look at it by clicking on the left image.

It took me around 3 seconds to import the wallpaper image into the project, another 5 seconds to set up the Texture, 5 more for the Material and not much longer to create a GameObject that displays it. The workflow feels okay so far, but there’s still a lot to improve. That’s why I’m heading towards a first pre-Alpha release with minimal functionality. I’m going to need testers to improve usability as much as possible.

I’m working on some kind of custom PropertyGrid Control right now. You might have spottet it in some of the Screenshots that I’ve previously posted. .Net does have an existing PropertyGrid which is customizable to some degree and I could just have used it – but after doing that in Nullpunkt and not being very happy with the results I’m now trying a different approach. Read more

If you use .Net Serialization, especially Deserialization, you might want to have an object perform a specific action as soon as it has been deserialized, initialize some cache data, resolve references or something. Read more

When I began to write ZweiDe back in 2007, the target framework was .Net 2.0. The third framework version was already released, but I assumed it would severely impact compatibility to require the newest stuff available. As it took years to bring ZweiDe anywhere near release, it was of course irrelevant. I didn’t care much since I had no practical idea of what I was missing anyway. In Duality, calculating with an estimated development time of forever, I figured out it might be worth a try targeting .Net 4.0 right from start. Read more