I’ve been reading several articles on altdevblogaday about code reviews. We’ve been doing code reviews at work since I started, at first doing over the shoulder reviews and then automated reviews. I prefer over the shoulder because the other person gets a better feel for why you’re making your changes. Those can tend to have draw backs at a large scale so, after combing these articles, here is my ideal code review set up.
I was talking to a co-worker who recently read some of the site. As an aside, thanks so much to anyone who reads this. As to the co-worker, I can’t thank you enough for giving solid feedback, it means a lot. What came from that conversation, was the implication that it’s hard to browse the blog content.
Catherine is a Puzzle/Adventure game published by Atlus. It was developed by the same team that did the recent Persona games. For those who haven’t played them they were turn based RPG’s based on high-school relationships, and would often go into serious issues. For example, they were featured on an episode of Extra Creditz for diving into issues around sexuality.
In video games and much of modern design, User Interaction is simultaneously the most and least important feature. At best it’s the least noticed component. At worst it will prevent anyone from using the product.
While investigating XNA lately, I’ve gotten stuck learning about the content pipeline a few times. This is a short post to share some good links that I’ve found in trying to make sense of it, and also explain it in a less jargon filled way than the Microsoft docs. The system was a bit confusing at first because it’s terminology isn’t what I’ve heard making games before.
Welcome to the first in what is hopefully a long running series of articles about user interface in video games. This maiden voyage will be to the world of Final Fantasy 13 or FFXIII. I spent a couple hours going through every screen in the game on top of the 90+ hours I’d spent playing it for fun. I’ll share what I found good and bad, why what’s good is good, and why I think what’s bad is there.
Long lasting involvement with an entertainment medium conveys a certain amount of inherent knowledge. You gain a familiarity with the common progression of story, typical aesthetic choices, music cues, and other common practices of the given medium. Games are no different.
Every game I still own is either new and unplayed, or connected to a memory. They all have a representational meaning to me and reflect parts of my life that I want to hold onto. Either that or they’ve taught me something important that has informed my life. Any time I’m prompted to trade in these games for new ones I think about that and refuse. I realized at some point that the games, movies, and photos I have are inseparable from me. They are physical representations of my life, and portals into the past. They are me.
I decided that I was tired of not having an easy to access list of tasks. I looked online and it’s mostly pay us 45 dollars for this complicated thing, or it’s intricately tied into a calendar program. There are way too many of these apps to begin to choose from so I just made my own in a day or two of work. It’s available in the Utilities section if you want to try it out.
I was recently introduced to Minecraft by a colleague and decided to try it out. Now I’ve invested hours that I’ll never get back into building large elaborate structures. It caused me to miss last weeks post. I’ll be damned if it wasn’t worth it because the game scratches every itch I have for making elaborate models in real life.