Category: Game development

Minecraft modding for fun and butter

My daughter has been playing Minecraft enthusiastically for more than a year now. Of course, my first thought as a programmer Mom was that this was my chance to rope her into programming. “Game mods!” I thought to myself, were the way so many people who started programming young got into it. She and I Read More

Cocoa Programming

This week I started reading Aaron Hillegaas’ Cocoa book.  Learning Objective-C is a bit confusing – all the []’s and @’s, etc – but not too bad.  It reminds me a lot of Smalltalk if you used a salt shaker to sprinkle some C on top of it. What I think I really need to Read More

Next step: developing for OS X

It’s been a while since I’ve worked on my game programming hobby, but I have not given up!  This is just a hiatus while I do actual paying work.   That beginning game programming book really served well for its purpose.  Now my next goal is to make a copy of an existing game from scratch. Read More

Hard at work making new games

I picked up right where I left off before in my beginning game programming book.  I just modified the book’s Frogger-type game with a chicken instead of a frog.  Keith made some mean chicken and car bitmap graphics for it.  I think it looks great. I’m working on learning game programming like a job.  But Read More

Flash games

I’m still plugging away with the games.  I’ve taken a detour to learn how to create games with Flash.  I’m reading ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University by Gary Rosenzweig.  I just created my first game – a memory/matching game – just like the first game in my other game programming book.  My biggest issue with Read More

My first game!

Well, it’s actually an example from the game programming book I’m working through, but I made a lot of changes to it to really dig into the programming.  So it’s “my first game for which I’ve ever done some programming.”  That works.  And there were two games, really: a memory game, and a two player Read More

More research

Another day doing “research.”  Besides not having any free time whatsoever, the main reason I haven’t played video games in years is that there haven’t been any games that I’ve been interested in playing.  I don’t like first person shooters or role playing games.  I don’t like sports games.  (In general – there are certainly Read More

Playing games

My husband corrected me: I have certainly had times in my life when I have played games, and I was good at them, too.  There was one winter break from school I spent entirely playing Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo.  I finished it.  I played plenty of Atari games for large stretches of Read More

Learning game development

It seems that every geeky programmer goes through a stage where they learn game programming.  For one reason or another – most likely that I have never in my life had very much free time for playing games – I never went through that stage.  Suddenly, many years post-adolescence, I have gotten the bug. We’re Read More