Watching Notch Create A Game For Ludum Dare

Spent quite a bit of time watching @notch create a game for the Ludum Dare (#LD48) gamedev competition. Devs have 48 hours to create a game using the theme of the competition. The theme for this year's competition is "Escape". While his game looks similar to the game he's known for, Minecraft, it's amazing just to watch how fast he codes in Java in Eclipse and how fast he creates graphics and maps in Paint.NET.

Stream is still up at http://www.twitch.tv/realnotch at this time.
The live stream is no longer up, as the competition is over, but you can play his game at:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ld48/index.html (Requires Java)

Keyboards - The Three Key Problem

When choosing default keys for your game, you might be inclined to use the spacebar in combination with the arrow keys, but there's a big problem with using those particular keys. A lot of keyboards don't allow you to press certain combinations of more than two keys at the same time. I had forgotten about this and just recently, while working on my bullet hell shooter, I started out using the spacebar and arrow keys to get my player shooting and moving. I quickly noticed that I couldn't move my player to the upper-left while pressing the spacebar. This is a pretty common problem.

So first of all, why does this happen? Shouldn't we be able to use the spacebar with two other arrow keys? Seems crazy, right? There's a simple explanation for this. This isn't a problem with the programming language or API you're using. The problem is actually the keyboard itself, and it stems from a design decision so that manufacturers can cut costs making Keyboards. Shawn Hargreaves has a good explanation, so no need for me to go into detail here.

So how do we fix it? There are better keyboards available that are tailored to gamers, but obviously you can't expect everyone who plays your game to go buy one. :) The answer is to simply use different default keys, while providing a way for the user to configure those keys. Looking at other shoot-em-ups, I've found that default keys are indeed not the spacebar and arrow keys. The Touhou series is a good example of this. The current Touhou game, Touhou 13, uses left-shift, z, x, c, and arrow keys, and doesn't use the spacebar at all. Avoiding the keyboard entirely and only supporting a gamepad is definitely not a good idea. I still have yet to hook my gamepad up to my PC, and I'm guessing there's a lot of gamers in the same boat.

A Path-finding Scenario

A* algorithm example

One big reason why I enjoy game programming so much is it makes us think outside the box. In a lot of situations, we as programmers must come up with custom solutions. One solution doesn't always work in all situations, especially when dealing with platforms with limited resources such as mobile phones. I also like to see other programmers' thought processes.

The article Path-finding For Princes by Rod-Mathisen, is a classic example of combining path-finding solutions to work best for his scenario for the iPhone. Of course, there are probably several number of solutions for his scenario, and I'm sure there are critics, but a lot of times, "whatever works" or "appears to work" in game programming is acceptable, especially if the solution is a fairly simple one.

Really Big Sky - Impressive Indie Shmup

Really Big Sky looks like an awesome indie shmup. Everything is procedurally generated and looks very impressive. At only $10, I'll most likely be picking it up shortly.
Support your indies and buy it here!.. (Demo is also available) http://bossbaddie.co.uk/bigsky/

.NET Memory Management and Garbage Collection

Clive Tong (from Red Gate) has an excellent post on The Top 5 .NET Memory Management Misconceptions, which does a great job of explaining how the .NET garbage collector works.

Now those Performance Counters listed under ".NET CLR Memory" (and debugging .NET memory issues in general) make more sense.

There's also a nice post by Ian Nicolade on High-End Performance Optimizations on the XBox 360 and Windows Phone 7 which explains some common ways to keep from generating huge amounts of garbage in apps that use potentially never-ending loops (such as games).