Elysian Shadows

Fuck the "global variables are bad" bullshit. This. Video games are real-time applications. Performance matters. Simplicity is King. No matter what kind of design paradigm you espouse, your game will run procedurally, because that's how the hardware works. A lot of "recommended pract...

This likely doesn't apply to your situation, but bear in mind that some games use non-square tiles, too. For example, the art style (and perspective) might be suited to 32x24 tiles, or something else weird. Generally, square, some-power-of-2 tiles are chosen, for the reasons explained in previous re...

Generally, if you're on desktop you probably already have an OpenGL C library (and headers) installed on your system. You can use OpenGL already, if that's the case. (Tutorials will show you how to link it, etc). If you're stuck I would recommend checking out this thread: http://forums.elysianshadow...

(necro'd--sorry. Not sure if I'm breaking the rules.) This thread answered a some of my Lua questions. I was worried that accessing entities via ID numbers from Lua was a bad system. So now my Lua entity access looks like this: (C99) int lua_entity_WhateverTheFuck(lua_State *LuaState) { int EntityID...

Ok, I need advice. After looking at several scripting languages for my C99 game dev project, I settled on Lua due to its popularity and simplicity. I have since spent the better part of a day searching Google and this forum for information, and have read quite a bit of Lua's user wiki as well. If I ...

A friend introduced me to it. It's like a lovechild of IRC and Skype/Teamspeak. And it has built in markdown formatting, which is cool. I personally hate Skype and I've been looking for an alternative to crap like Facebook chat. Social networks have killed most independent chat protocols. I barely s...

Thank you for the feedback, guys. :) In the team's latest report I suggested a stringent code-review policy--the team just kinda went along with it but didn't seem enthused. Maybe I can get them to do it, though. Part of the difficulty is that we're supposed to be equals--the folks in charge just de...

I dunno if this is the appropriate place to share this. Over the past few days I put together a little script library for building customized, static blogs. It can generate a base site and post templates for you, etc. You write posts in markdown, then have it compile the site to html. It also genera...

Ok, I could really use some good advice on this. I am an asshole. This is a problem in professional settings. My general policy to mitigate that is to be somewhat of a yes man and go into soppy retail customer service mode. Obviously, this is not helpful to me or the work. I recently got hired for a...

As you build on top of it and clean it up you should iteratively update the Git repo so that anyone using it to learn can go back and look at your history if they want. If you're trying to preserve the simplest possible project, you could fork it for the more complex version. That's the plan, actua...

Hey guys. Made a simple Pong clone for a thing. Thought it might help someone just starting out to understand SDL/OpenGL, basic game logic and program flow control, etc. Be forewarned: Shit has one .c file, and is a bit ugly. It is the way it is on purpose. Anyway, here's the repo: https://github.co...

GameMaker doesn't work well to further your programming skill, and whether or not that's a problem is up to you, obviously. However, unless the engine has changed since I played with it, building an RPG in it would be reeeeally inefficient and irritating (and that's coming from someone who regularly...

After all the discussion and thinking about what will best fit the gameplay experience I want to achieve, I think I've settled on using a Secret of Mana-/Chrono Trigger-style map implementation for the game world, but also keeping a limited hub level/base of operations structure in place to prevent ...

Sorry for all the confusion, guys. :oops: Ok! By "overworld" I'm referring to the primary chunk of the game where the player can explore and travel. In Skyrim, this is the game in any outdoor area, with buildings and dungeons being loaded and interacted with in separate segments (disregard...

Ironically, I actually like this idea the best. A hub level would allow you hide secrets in it and allow the player to explore with the same freedoms they're familiar with from regular levels. Hm... Actually, you may be onto something! After reading this I tried to think of a way for a hub level to...