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Discrete physics on a 2D grid: a dissatisfying solution

In last week’s post, I discussed my first two failed attempts at creating something like physics on a 2D grid. It gathered a good deal of attention on Reddit, with several replies from people claiming to have solved it, only to introduce new problems. As I already knew, this problem is surprisingly tricky!

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Discrete physics on a 2D grid: how hard can it be?

In the last post, I described my requirements for a 2D discrete physics system I’m working on. Now that I’ve laid out what the system should do, let’s turn to the implementation.

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Discrete physics on a 2D grid: setting the stage

For a new game I’m working on, I need some 2D “physics” that work in discrete time and discrete space. In other words: every object consists of one or more blocks aligned to a square grid, and time advances in turn-based steps. If you’re thinking of Sokoban, you’ve got the idea:

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Texture compression on mobile demystified

If you’re developing a game for mobile devices, chances are you have run into the words “texture compression”. Texture compression helps to keep video memory usage down, reduce download sizes and loading times, and may even reduce power consumption. In this article, I take a comprehensive look at what the options are.

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10 cool things about Kotlin

Kotlin is a programming language developed by JetBrains (the makers of IntelliJ IDEA), which compiles down to Java bytecode. I got over my initial aversion for the ugly name, and decided to give it a try. Now I never want to go back to Java. Here’s why.

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Choosing an HTML5 2D engine

Because Dragon Attack’s performance on Crafty.js was disappointing, and the libGDX port also had problems running smoothly when compiled to JavaScript (plus some unfortunate technical decisions I made along the way), I’ve decided to go for a third rewrite, using better tech. (“Rewrite” sounds worse than it really is – we’re talking about a two-day Ludum Dare project, after all.)

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