Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of aspiring game developers, both in-person and online. It’s been amazing seeing so many people take an interest in making their own video games, but I’ve also started to notice a more recent trend in the people seeking help. The internet is so rife with tutorials about how to do specific things in any game engine imaginable that beginner game developers can find exact code snippets to do virtually anything they want to…until they can’t. Eventually, it seems they reach a point where they need to do something specific to their game that no one has done before. They can’t find a tutorial and code snippet to copy, so they turn to the internet and start asking how to do it. This isn’t bad in itself. There are hundreds of game developers who are all too happy to help someone make their game a reality by sharing their knowledge, but it can also be frustrating to try to explain to someone the workings behind a solution when they lack the foundation needed to understand it. The result seems to be either more copy-paste code that results in a mess of code that feels like it’s held together by sheer willpower and luck, or a beginner that gets frustrated that no one will give the exact code needed to make their idea work which results in both the helper and helped being frustrated.
I’ve started this blog to share the algorithms, design patterns, and approaches I’ve seen over the years in game and simulation programming and to answer some of the more common questions I see online. I will try to present the algorithms in a language-agnostic way so people can understand how they work and implement them in whatever engine or framework they want. If you’re looking for how to make a health bar in Unity, this probably won’t be the place for you. If you want to learn how health bars work so you can write your own in any position, colour, and engine you want, then stick around because that’s what we’re here for!
My goal is to post every friday, but being a substitute teacher in the middle of a global pandemic has kept me insanely busy. I hope you’ll bear with me if the occasional Friday gets missed. I’ll try to keep them as infrequent as possible.