Ludum Dare 37 was the first jam I’ve ever attended, and it was one of the major factors that helped me to finish my projects and move from making simple clones of other games to create my own ones. I really enjoy participating in it, and this time wasn’t an exception. But I have to admit, it came by when I was least expecting it. One day I’ve logged onto the Ludum dare website and saw the timer saying "3 days left". It was really bad timing for me. You see, for over 2 years I’ve been dreaming of going into Ludum Dare with my engine and language, and this time around I was almost done with it, but not completely. A few annoying segfaults still plagued both the engine and the language, and when the theme announcement woke me up, I sat in my dark room without an engine and any inspiration.
In the world of productivity, one of the most important tools each person should have is a task manager. It’s a stretchable definition, you can track every single task in your life or just have a general idea of what projects you are working on, but no matter how you organize your tasks, you should have one. And here are a few reasons why:
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It makes sure you won’t forget the task. Our brains have limited RAM available and by writing the task into long-term storage, we can free our precious RAM yet make sure, that we won’t forget to send the invoice.
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It helps you to see everything you have to do from a bird-eye view and decide what is the most important stuff to do right now, and what you can get rid of.
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I also find it very calming to write down all my tasks for the day, if I feel overwhelmed. Seeing it on paper makes it look like much less work, that my brain makes me believe it is.
And I’ve gone through so many task tracking tools! Everyone’s brain works a tiny bit different from the rest of us, and that means everyone has their very own preferred way of storing tasks. But I’ve stuck with two: trello & markdown files.
Whatever language you use these days, be it JavaScript or C, C# or Lua, all of your source files have eventually to go through a compiler. Some of the languages require you to compile the code just once to be run how many times you want, and some require you to ship your source code in order to compile and execute it at the client-side. It feels like, there could not be a more clear difference between the two, but where do you draw the line between interpreters and compilers?
Hey!
It has been a while, huh?
Umm, did I say something about writing more in the new year resolution? Wel… I think we both see how this turned out, oops. But yes, I’ve been extremely busy with Burning Knight, my indie game (that is out now, please buy a copy!)
So, I usually don’t go into many details on the development on social media, especially recently, but this is what this blog is for, even if no one is reading, this is like a time capsule to my future self. But if you are reading this, well, I’m glad I’m not shouting into the void.
Oh wow, it’s 31st already? Maaan, time flies by like crazy. So I guess, I don’t really have any more time to procrastinate this article, huh?
Hi, Egor here.
So a few months ago, I got invited to a game conference in Moscow, called White Nights. I’ve never been to a gamecon before, so I got really excited and started preparing my game, Burning Knight, for the showcase section. At first, 1.5 months looked like a huge time frame to get the game ready, but it flew by so fast…
Hi. I’m a fellow indie developer, who tries to put a word about his game out into the world. And before this September, Steam was by far the most influential platform for me. It allowed me to show my game to thousands of players…
But now it’s over. Steam killed my traffic.
Hey guys, Egor here.
Remember that post from December 2018, where I talked about development plans for Burning Knight? Well, I was right about one thing for sure: the development did not go according to the plan… So let’s talk about this.
Roguelikes are defined by two key things: perma death and procgen. Permadeath is super simple to implement, but that’s not the case with procgen. There are thousands of ways, how you can implement it, and today we are going to look underhood of the Burning Knight engine (it’s called Lens, btw), and see what type of monsters live there.
So I’ve been randomly making tweetcarts for the past 2 years, and I’ve been always obsessed with how much cool stuff people can fit into a single tweet! I see a lot of guys out there who try to start with tweetcarts but struggle with fitting their doodles into such a tiny size margin.
So here is a guide on how to do it, and a few tricks that I use myself.
But what are tweetcarts?
In case you didn’t see this magic yet: tweet carts are PICO-8 doodles, that fit into a single tweet. That means that each of those masterpieces is not longer than 280 chars (bytes).
Tweetjam first started in 2016 on the PICO-8 forums, but quickly moved over to tweetjam hashtag on twitter.
If you’ve stuck with twitter for long enough, you remember, that tweet limitation on twitter was not always 280 chars. It all started out with just 140! So if you check out the early tweetcarts, they all are just a half of the modern ones, compared by the size!