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Is QA a Good Way Into Game Development?

By Jeff | Published: October 24, 2011

I often get questions from people wondering whether a job in quality assurance is a good path to becoming a game developer. The answer is, “not really.” Here’s why.

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Posted in employment, games | 5 Comments

Conservation of Mentons

By Jeff | Published: October 19, 2011

I like to imagine that my brain runs on mentons.

Mentons are tiny particles of mental energy that move through the brain producing thoughts, intuitions, and insights. The more mentons you have, the more ideas you are able to produce and the better the quality of those ideas. When you run low on mentons you feel listless, dull, and tired, and you can no longer think straight.

Picturing mentons helps me to think about how I think and I can think better. If you’re in the idea business, as I am, you care a lot about getting and using mentons.

So how do you get more mentons? How do you use them to produce great ideas?

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Posted in productivity, programming, thinking | 3 Comments

Mentons: What the Brain Runs On

By Jeff | Published: October 18, 2011

The brain runs on fuel. I discover this every evening when the night looms black through the windows and the pillow beckons. After a long day of thinking and typing and talking and listening and programming and parenting and the rest, I start to run out of steam.

And yet I’m convinced that steam is not the fuel my brain runs on.

I have several evidences for this belief. First, my head is not (usually) hot enough to suggest that steam churns within it during my most productive hours. Second, my experiences with bringing steam into contact with flesh suggest that the combination is not a happy one, and since my brain is flesh, I don’t imagine it would feel as comfortable as it usually does with steam running through it. Finally, if my brain ran on steam, presumably it would have to vent at times due to pressure build-up or whatnot. Since steam never actually comes out of my ears (despite what my kids say), I don’t see evidence of its venting, and thus no evidence of steam.

For these three reasons, I don’t believe the brain runs on steam.

But it must run on something, because it can clearly run out of whatever it runs on, and does so virtually every night.

In fact, sometimes my brain runs out of whatever it is long before night comes. Sometimes after a particularly grueling day, my brain is so low on fuel by dinnertime that I can barely navigate the drive home. On particularly bad days—and these seem to happen especially after a really terrific Tex-Mex lunch—I’m ready to fall asleep by 2PM and can hardly rub two thoughts together (speaking metaphorically, of course).

So what is it that fuels the brain—that enables it to work? What substance or particle is it that my brain uses to generate ideas and intuitions, visions and creations? What causes this fuel to run out, and how do I get more of it?

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Posted in productivity, programming, thinking | Leave a comment

Keep Taking Steps Forward

By Jeff | Published: October 17, 2011

In the last couple of posts I’ve talked about a programmer’s greatest enemy: getting stuck. I talked about the various levels of how stuck you can get, from getting stuck while trudging through documentation to getting stuck because you don’t have the resources—passwords, files—that you need to perform a task.

This leads me to my ultimate advice for how to avoid getting stuck and how to get unstuck.

The secret to getting and staying unstuck is to keeping taking steps forward. Simple as that sounds, it is more difficult than it seems, and many programmers never master it.

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Posted in productivity, programming, thinking | 10 Comments

Four Kinds of Stuck

By Jeff | Published: October 16, 2011

A programmer’s worst enemy is getting stuck. Getting stuck on a problem hurts your productivity. Worse than that, it hurts your joy, your confidence, and your soul. Therefore learning how to avoid getting stuck, how to recognize when you’re stuck, and how to get unstuck is a key skill in the quest of becoming a great programmer.

One of the things that helps me both to avoid getting stuck and to get out of being stuck is understanding the different kinds of stuck.

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Posted in productivity, programming, thinking | 30 Comments

A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy

By Jeff | Published: October 14, 2011

A programmer’s greatest enemy is getting stuck. A crucial skill in programming—and one that many of my beginning game programming students lack—is the ability to recognize when they’re stuck, to get out of being stuck, and to avoid getting stuck in the first place.

Indeed, it’s a skill I’m still learning myself, although the contexts in which I still get stuck are shrinking with time, study, and experience.

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Posted in employment, productivity, programming, thinking | 70 Comments

How Siri Works

By Jeff | Published: October 5, 2011

Once again someone has offered us incredible artificial intelligence, and once again we are bracing for disappointment. It happened with handwriting recognition on the Newton, which proved to be slow and clumsy. It happened with the not-as-smart-as-they-first-appeared creatures of Lionhead’s Black and White. And remember the Kinect debut video showing a kid interacting with an on-screen villain effortlessly, the AI character perfectly intoning the kid’s name? Kinect brought some of the innovations promised in that early teaser, but clearly the video implied a level of sophistication and polish that turned to vapor in the end.

But it’s Apple this time, with Siri on the iPhone 4S. And although Apple has screwed up before—witness the aforementioned Newton—if anyone has the motivation, the resources, and the smarts to get AI right, the iPhone dev team is it.

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Posted in iPhone, programming, technology | 61 Comments

Game Control Concept – Swordsman

By Jeff | Published: September 3, 2011

Years ago I fell in love with an Apple II game called Bilestode. I’ve long dreamed of making a game that captures some of its look and feel. I finally got around to starting a mock-up of how such a game might play, but I’m not sure whether the concept would really work. So please check out the little control concept demo below and tell me what you think.

To begin, click once somewhere inside the game window. Then use W and S to go forward and backward, A and D to turn left and right, and move the mouse to control the sword.

Get Adobe Flash player

 

Thoughts?

Posted in games | Tagged concept, demo, Flash, games, mockup | 13 Comments

Why Won’t Developers Listen to Your Game Idea?

By Jeff | Published: September 3, 2011

I’ve written a couple of posts about how to get your game idea made into a game. Or maybe I should say that I’ve written a couple of posts about how desperately, impossibly hard it is to get your game idea made into a game. Despite my warnings, I still get many emails and comments every week from people telling me, “I saw your post and I’ve got this awesome idea that needs to be made, and would you help me get it made?” They didn’t read the posts.

But some thoughtful readers do actually read the posts. Rivalhopeso posted a comment with an excellent question about how to get ideas into games, and his question deserves an answer.

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Posted in games | Tagged casual games, game business, game ideas, games | 6 Comments

All the World’s a Game

By Jeff | Published: September 1, 2011

Origin SystemsI’ve been playing a lot of Minecraft lately. Exploring its complex, primal, randomly-generated environments has helped me to firm up an intuition about games and religion—at least my religion—that I’ve been toying with for years.

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Posted in faith, games | 5 Comments
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