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.

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.

All of our brains use models to experience everyday life. An easy example is seeing the egg splat on the floor in your head right as it rolls off the table which somehow invokes the physics collider simulator you have going on up there. Everyone we interact with has the person base class with some properties about their gender, age, etc. which defines all the basic assumptions (and stereotypes we’ve picked up) about how the person will act. If I hit this person they’ll be angry of course. Then down through all the convoluted hierarchy of your brain’s person class there’s a person instance for each of the Jennifer’s, Steve’s, and Mike’s in your life. The more experience you have with the person the better your model is, all the way to the weird dialogs you have with these people in your head.

Leaflet Zip Code Map Part 1

This is the first part of a two part series about how to set up leaflet maps to show zipcode areas with some extra data coming along for the ride allowing us to color the zip code areas based on demographics or any other reporting data. I did this using an ASP.NET MVC site and Web API with a Sql Server database. A database is required for this approach but there’s nothing stopping you from reimplementing this in your backend architecture of choice.

I’m sure many of you have heard this quote before but I want to explore one reason why it’s so true: consistency.

Inifiniscroll is great. When used properly of course. Google images is the poster child for this and it works so great because they basically have infinite images. The pattern breaks down when it’s forced into places where you have less than infinite content. Much less than infinite content.