Here are your Journal Land entries from the period of 10/28 - 11/11

Featured GDNet+ Journal Entry

I am a duck - Mike Bossy has a couple videos showing the progress of his prototype as he describes the various tweaks and ideas he goes through. Note that he doesn't care much about how the game looks at this stage, only how it plays. He also adds that his company (Valve) is looking for new hires - so check out the GDNet job ad and see if you qualify!

Featured Member Journal Entry

The Bag of Holding - ApochPiQ shares a story that encapsulates the problem of naming your functions in a way that can end up with the user not handling them correctly in code. It's pretty eye-opening to see some code that looks completely functional turn out to operate in a completely illogical way thanks to a mus-interpretation of a function name

Welcome, all ye new Journal Land scribes: Gl_Terminator, Litheon and ELawson!

From the Staff

• GameDev.net Staff Journal - site Executive Producer Drew Sikora returns to continue talking about the new way GDNet will be handling content. This time around we're talking about how we've simplified the category system used to classify articles and mapped it directly to the forums. Speaking of the forums, a good deal of change will be seen when we merge and rename several to streamline the community that's grown so large over the years.
  Project Updates
  
  
  • __Homer__'s Journal - can't tell if __Homer__ is associated with this project or not but here's a jousting game that sounds like it's been submitted to the IGF student showcase you can download and check out
  • Milcho's Journal - grass, water and detail textures have been added to Milcho's procedural terrain generator and he has a new video of it in action as well as a new build for people to download
  • One man show - ne0_kamen has up his results from the 0h Game Jam that had people build a game in the hour before Daylight Savings Time, when the clocks rolled back to the time they began working.
  • Jemgine - since lambda functions are included in DeyjaScript, the next addition to the language Deyja has implemented are closures. The updated source is available
  • SteelGolem's Journal - SteelGolem is looking at various colors for his night and day themes and also has clouds floating around the sky
  • Graphics & Games... or the other way around - Matias Goldberg has a huuuuge update on his project with a ton of screenshots showing the progress made to the characters and environments
  • Unity3D and AI Game Development - rwilson1982 has a video demonstrating the AI actions in his project and also links to a post on his blog that instructs you on the use of fonts in Unity3D through C# scripts, which wasn't a topic he could find much information on at the time
  • Meh Entertainment - meh.team has revealed they're working on an MMO strategic creature collection game and if you have any cool creature ideas send them in!
  • Once a Bird - Demosthenes has a video showcasing some new character art and fog effects, also previously he posted on a nice Ghostbuster's easter egg.
  • Kimmi's developer blog - in addition to adding unique resource identifiers to load assets, Kimmi has made it so you can define file systems when loading assets so you can, for example, pull them out of a zip file instead of from a disk
  • Walking Towards The Sun - freeworld has a new video on the Araknoid-clone he's working on, which shows off the level editor work in progress
  • Journal of matt_j - matt_j just swings by to remind everyone to check out his game remake Spectre, which he says has been doing well in the AppStore. Good stuff!
  • FlyingSpork's Journal - FlyingSpork discusses unit testing and shows a shot of his SimCity-esque city builder project, in which he's currently laying out power to structures.
  • Beals Software - Programmer16 shows the 2D RPG engine and auto-updater he's been working on since he last posted, discussing what the RPG engine can do and where it's going.
  • SuperMaximo93's game development - SuperMaximo93 reveals concept art and details for his new project Station 6, a puzzle platformer.
  • Pixel ? Tile ? World - Servant of the Lord has worked on some more art packs for inclusion in the GDNet Marketplace store, also for use in his AdventureFar project
    Game Dev Stuffs
    
    
    • swiftcoding - swiftcoder drops some good advice on how you should bid for a freelance project. Unsure how to estimate what to charge? He covers the important things you should consider when working up an estimate
    • Necron00bicon - jjd passes on a link to a series of tutorial on Gamasutra for creating 2D scenes and characters using inkscape
    • Chronicles of the Hieroglyph - although Jason Z admits it's easier in DX11 than DX9, resizing windows can still be a bit of a pain to handle from a rendering standpoint. He discusses the things he's learned in getting the Hieroglyph 3 engine set up to respond properly to window resize events
    • New Old Things - Endurion's last two steps in making a Commodore 64 game have focused on the high-score screen - adding some color cycling effects and a better name entry screen
    • Beals Software - LuaInterface, C#, and Coroutines are the topics discussed by Programmer16, who is revisiting these for his 2D RPG engine.
    • Slaton's Journal - Slaton takes issue with broadly labeling games as "fun", arguing that games can be much more meaningful and deeper than this, and should properly be described as thus
    • The Code Zone Bargain Basement Blog - what's better than developing and pushing out an app in two weeks? Doing it in one week! johnhattan decided to one-up his last effort in publishing an app quickly and goes over how he got things up and running and out the door in just 7 days
    • Digivance Game Studios - Dan Mayor argues that you need a solid game design document to successfully make your game become a reality. Check out his thoughts and then let him know whether you agree or not that a core design document is required
      Other Stuffs
      
      
      • FlyingSpork's Journal - FlyingSpork adds tornadoes to MineCraft
      • Horror Stories of RanBlade - everyone keep sending good vibes to RanBlade - he's almost got the job!
      • Wavesonics Pseudo-Random Journal Generator - Wavesonics continues work on his breathalyzer side-project while he waits for parts to complete his main project. He shares the technical details in getting the breathalyzer to be more accurate and also talks about why breathalyzers are only a decent indicator of blood alcohol levels
        Thanks for stopping by Smeagol, Zethariel