GameJams.... is it good practice?
June 17, 2019, at 03:24 PM (2 comments)
Title: GameJams.... is it good practice? Author: mgarcia Date: 2019-06-17 23:24 +1000 Tags: 2019, Industry, 3DS, Pics, GameDev, Blog Comments: Open
Practice vs GameJams
Practice, is the repetitive process in which we learn. GameJams, is really about finishing a (small) project. Both are good, but two completely different things!
GameJams, are great for reinforce something already learnt and working under pressure, like a test. But I wouldn't say GameJams are great for learning.
Mike Acton at HandmadeCon 2015, gives great advice on practice!
- "throw away everything after every practice... so you have to get better".
Handmade Hero - HandmadeCon 2015 - Mike Acton
Jonathan Blow, also at HandmadeCon 2015, talks about the same thing, saying that due to hardware limitations, performance was an iterative process.
Handmade Hero - HandmadeCon 2015 - Jonathan Blow
My little 3DS engine update
I haven't updated this blog in a while... but I'm still playing with the 3DS and 3D!
The advice above, I guess is old fashioned in today's instant world, but it's still very important in master a craft.
I've iterated a lot on different game engines, for different reasons and every time starting new, it becomes a small stack of software knowledge in my mind.
Anyway, here is an image of the engine rendering pseudo lighting, simply changing the quad RGB value based on distance.
The bar is a billboarded image, with normal RBG values (1.0).
There's also collision detection.. well ground detection anyway!
Find the ground's height
As a math noob, I find math to be magic!
Maybe that's why I like the 3D pipeline, objects in local space, the transformation (scale, rotation and translation) into world space, culling in view space and the rendering in screen space and all the fun stuff in between XD.
The ground (height) testing took me a while to figure out, it's basically linear math using the polygon's center and it's unit normal (a direction vector that's perpendicular with values ranging 0.0 to 1.0).
Basically calculate the difference from the X and Z center and multiply it by the normal, add it together then add the multiplication of the center's Y by the normal's Y, add it all together then divide it by the normal's Y value. Magic!
f32 height = ( (posZ-centerZ )* nNormalZ + (posX-centerX)*nNormalX + centerY*nNormalY )/ nNormalY;
2 comments on "GameJams.... is it good practice?"
I know a lot of people say that jams are a good way to get feedback, but I usually don't find it helpful. Most of the comments are usually how someone else thinks your game should be made, or things that are obviously missing due to it being created under time constraints.
You're a gamejam pro for sure ;)