Sunlight

Every programmer must have encountered these: weird bugs. Unexplainable bugs that make you want to tear your hair out. Bugs that are just plain funny in their bizarreness. Even bugs that are pants-on-head-retarded. I have written about a very out-of-the-box bug and a painful oversight bug before, and since then I have encountered hundreds (or was it thousands?) of other bugs. Today I would like to give you my favourites. These bugs are from various categories: from funny, to surprising, to dumb library design. Most we have been able to solve, but for some the exact cause still remains a mystery. The one thing they have in common, is that I remember them fondly. Or frowning. Or while gritting my teeth... Click here for numbers 3 to 1 7. Std::abs differs between compilers This is one I encountered recently in Awesomenauts . We thought hardly any Mac users would have gamepads, so we had initially decided not to support those on Mac. After launching Awesomenauts on Mac, this turned out d...

Cello Fortress could have been any kind of game. The core concept is nothing more than: " a game in which a live cellist controls the game by playing cello, and plays with or against the audience ". This idea can be applied to any genre. The cello could control a brawler, a puzzler, a strategy game, a racing game, with some imagination maybe even a point and click adventure. So why did I specifically make a twin stick shooter? A lot of thinking and brainstorming went into this choice, so today I would like to explain that a bit. Doing something with improvisation on my cello and my computer is a topic I have been thinking about for years, but it wasn't until a year or two ago that it dawned on me that the cello could actually be a game controller. Before that, I was mostly thinking about writing a procedural music generator that could accompany my own cello improvisations. Quite a big step from a game, but it slowly evolved into one from there nevertheless. Knowing that ...

A couple of months ago I revealed my new project Cello Fortress . Now it is finally time for a proper trailer! Cello Fortress is a unique combination of a live cello concert and a game, and is intended to be played at events (festivals and such). This trailer shows how the game works, and shows a bit of the interaction between the players and the cellist. Cello Fortress is pretty weird and unique, so I guess so far only those who actually played it, really understood what Cello Fortress is about. Hopefully this trailer will clear it up for others as well! (Video footage recorded by Dyzlo Film at Indigo .) In essence, Cello Fortress is a twin stick shooter. Four players cooperate using Xbox controllers to destroy as many cannons as possible. However, the cannons are not controlled by the computer, but by a live cellist! He improvises live music on his cello, and tries to do that in such a way that the game not only does what he wants, but also that the music actually sounds good. In a ...

I have been writing articles for this blog for almost 2.5 years now, and I have strived to cover a very diverse set of topics around game development. I don't really know my readers, though, so having such a broad range of themes has made me curious: what subjects on this blog do you enjoy reading about most? What would you like me to write about in the future? To the right you can see a little poll with the broad topics, please select your favourite! I'd also love to hear about specific topics you would like to read about. Please leave a comment and let me know! Any other feedback on this blog is also welcome. In the coming year, I'd like to try to cover some of the requests with (hopefully) interesting articles!