A Critique of React Hooks

  April 27th 2020
  46K views
A few thoughts to consider when using React hooks
1,235 words
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~6min read
Cover Image of the Post

Unity Save Game Editor

  November 18th 2019
  158K views
Hack your unity save games with this handy save game editor.
303 words
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~2min read

Hex Map Area Borders

  June 16th 2019
  4K views
Today we’re going to learn how to create a nice border around the perimeter of an area in a hex map using Unity and a LineRenderer. Here I have it as a dotted purple line but you can make it look like anything you want with the flexibility of the line renderer!
1,639 words
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~8min read

Minimizing string GC in Unity

  April 3rd 2019
  1K views
An easy trap to fall into when you’re starting out in Unity is creating strings each frame in your update loop. Say you have score that can change from a bunch of things: eliminating foes, jumping on a block, collecting a ring, or just existing. Whatever floats your boat. Then in your score updater component you just do:
600 words
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~3min read

Actions and Selections with Card Lang

  December 14th 2018
  1K views
When the events we set up in part 1 of exploring the card language fire it would be quite nice if they could actually do something! This is where actions get their chance to shine. There are a ton of different actions a card can take but we’ll start out with just a few example ones like doing damage to pieces (Hit), healing them, or drawing a card. Just as we can have multiple events on a card we should also be able to have multiple actions for each event. We’ll also need a way to pass arguments to these actions to tell them which pieces to hit, what player draws the card, and so on.
995 words
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~5min read

Introducing Card Lang

  December 13th 2017
  1K views
When I was first starting the project that would become Solaria Tactics I knew that if you’re going to make a card game, you better make the cards easy to design and tweak. There’s going to be hundreds of cards each with special rules, conditions, actions and other crazy stuff I want to add. Designing all these cards and making sure they work as intended would be a big challenge then especially with a developer team of one. So the challenge was take a card description like “Deal 5 damage to all minions” and encode that into something the game engine can understand and execute when you play that card. I had heard games like Hearthstone have a custom editor tool for designing and setting up the cards which I briefly considered doing, but that seemed like a black hole of time to create and maintain. It then dawned on me that the problem I was trying to solve, “Create meaning out of text”, is exactly what languages (both computer and written) are meant to do. Brilliant! I would create my own DSL which I could customize fairly easily and get all the power I need out of it. This idea also really appealed to the CS nerd inside of me since computer languages are such great examples of recursion. We’ll be using a program to make a language which will then be used to make a program!
951 words
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~5min read

A Better Isometric Camera Control

  December 2nd 2017
  2K views
Greetings from Solaria! This is the first dev blog post of many as I progress on the development of Solaria Tactics. Hopefully these will be useful for other developers on their long journeys in game development.
1,282 words
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~6min read

The Asynchronous Journey

  July 8th 2015
  2K views
I love song covers. Yes, not all of them live up to capture all the spirit of the original recording, but getting through all the bad ones is suddenly worth it when you find the good ones. You might know the ones I’m talking about, they might be faster, cleaner, heavier sounding, different solo’s, or all of the above. You know it’s good when they take the song in a new direction that invokes a new vibe but with all the familiarity of the original. It’s really what music is all about… taking what’s out there and putting a different spin on it to put another mind in a trance.
940 words
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~5min read