Ben Garney
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Fundamentally F$#ed Up Projects
The nature of most game dev projects I have been involved in is that they are fundamentally f#$ed up in at least a few key ways… — bengarney (@bengarney) October 28, 2015 The trick as a technical contributor is not obsessing over badness and locking in technical wins that let the project fix itself later…
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Putting Money on the Screen
Jeff Tunnell is an awesome producer (among his other talents), and I’ve learned a lot from working with him. One of his frequent words of guidance while wearing his producer hat? “Put the money on the screen.” There are a lot of ways to prioritize building software. What feature/change do you tackle first? Depending on…
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Code Caving
https://twitter.com/AngryMooseZA/status/638232075649347584 https://twitter.com/AngryMooseZA/status/638233684982779904 Lately, we’ve been doing a lot of code caving at The Engine Co. Expert code explorers, like Fabien Sanglard, have an amazing ability to take very complex codebases and understand their core concepts. They can extend them and make them turn all kinds of tricks. While you shouldn’t miss Fabien’s analysis of Quake 3,…
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Some Notes on Mac Configuration
I was recently advising a fellow TEC-er on setting up their Mac, and they suggested I write it up. These are the tools I use daily for development! Here we go… Alfred is an awesome tool. Like the Windows key on Win8, you can hit a keyboard shortcut (cmd-space by default) and type an app name or…
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Loom at FITC Screens 2013 and Samsung Developer Conference
I will be speaking about Loom, Flash, and other interactive media topics at FITC SCREENS 2013! With glorious downtown Toronto as my backdrop, I’ll be discussing the Flash/AIR landscape, why we built Loom, and demoing how it’s a great open source platform on which for you to build apps AND games. If you need to build cross…
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Deep Breath & Measure
“Your app is slow!” What are you going to do about it? Is it that new code the intern landed? Is it the operating system’s fault? Misconfigured hardware? Or even, god forbid, a bad algorithm? Your thoughts run to that bloated subsystem. You know the one. It’s complicated. You’ve had your eye on it for…
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The Draw-Render-Update Conspiracy
I love clear terminology. It’s the engineer in me. This post is about some self-perpetuating terminology that confused me as a new developer. The confusion centers around functions named draw() or renderFoo(). As a new developer, you get excited – “Ah hah!” you think to yourself, “I am about to see something cool go down here.” So you pop…
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Flatten Your Conditionals!
Deep nesting is a pet peeve of mine. I’m going to show you what deeply nested code is and discuss some strategies for keeping things tidy. It’s my opinion that deep nesting is a sign of sloppy code. You know, code like this (with my condolences to the author): This code is hard to understand.…
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Ludum Dare 26 & Loom
Are you a fan of Ludum Dare? I’ve loved watching it for a long time. The huge community of excited developers is fantastic to watch, and some great games come out every time. More than that, LD is a great opportunity. In fact, such a good opportunity that we’re giving LD participants a huge deal…
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Loom is Launched!
Howdy! You may have wondered what I’ve been up to since PushButton Labs and PushButton Engine. Nate Beck, Josh Engebretson, and I are proud to share our latest creation, the Loom Game Engine, with the world. It’s a native mobile game engine with live reloading of code and assets, a great command line workflow, and…
Ben Garney 