AltDevConf is an online community-driven conference that will take place February 11-12, 2012
We aim provide free access to a comprehensive selection of game development topics taught by leading industry experts, and to create a space where bright and innovative voices can be heard.
Q: What is #AltDevBlogADay?
#AltDevBlogADay is a group of game developers and otherwise interested people (generally found on Twitter), ranging from experienced devs to students and educators to hobbyists, that want to blog more regularly. An idea inspired by iDevBlogADay.
Q: What do/can the developers post about?
Our peeps will post about anything they think might be interesting. That can vary from the extremely technical to the very high-level. It can be specific to their experience in game development, or simply a marginally related topic of interest. Basically we post what we think is interesting. And hopefully that's interesting to you too!
Q: How can I participate?
If you're a game developer (or related) and want to contribute, contact @mike_acton on twitter or email at macton@gmail.com
Also see: #readme (for Writers)
Q: Can you slow down the rate of posts? I'm having a hard time keeping up!
Nope. It's not live TV. You don't have to read it as it's written. You're welcome to read the posts at any rate you like. It's the nature of the internet that more information is generated than you could possibly consume. I suspect there are Wikipedia pages you haven't read either. ;)
Sharon Price, you may know better as RoachSniper on the Internet, is the next featured speaker, for the AltDev Student Summit. Her session is called “A Day in the Life of Scrabble!”, read on for more info!
Today we’re announcing our first keynote speaker for the AltDev Student Summit. We wanted to find someone who was inspirational, a great speaker, and also had a good working knowledge of the realities of both the industry and gamedev education. Ian Schreiber more than meets all of these criteria, and we’re delighted that he is willing to take time out of his hectic schedule to speak at the Summit. Ian’s keynote is called “Thinking Three Moves Ahead”.
Introduction
SSAO (Screen space ambient occlusion) is a common post processing effect that approximate how much light is occluded in a given surface by the surrounding objects. In this year SIGGRAPH, there are a few slides in “The Technology behind the Unreal Engine 4 Elemental Demo” about how they implement SSAO. Their technique can either use only the depth buffer or with the addition of per-pixel normal. And I tried to implement both version with a slight modification:
Game piracy is a huge problem. All app developers suffer from it, but game developers are particularly vulnerable. One acclaimed indie developer suffered a 95% piracy rate for his PC title, and the problem has carried over to many developers on the mobile platforms, especially Android. After months of hard work, one Android developer found that over 40 piracy blogs had picked up his game within 24 hours of launch. Mad Finger Games recently did an interview where they said they saw a 60% piracy rate across iOS and Android.
For solo developers or small teams, the best way to combat piracy is to do their best to prevent piracy in the first place. Here’s some anti-piracy tips to make life harder for those swashbuckling app thieves.
Our next speaker is Kate Edwards, who will be presenting a session that we’re really excited for, since it definitely counts as something that would never be taught. Kate’s session is called “Creating Games for Global Players – Considering Localization & Culturalization”.
Up next is Jeff Ward, who needs little introduction. Jeff is going to be talking as part of our “All the Things You’ll Never Be Taught” track on a subject that seems to have him quite fired up! It’s called “OOP Is the Root of All Evil”.
Today we want to introduce you to Romana Ramzan, from Scottish indie studio Denki. Romana will be speaking as part of the “A Day in the Life of…” track, talking about “A Day in the Life of a Player Champion”.
It doesn’t take much for negative feelings to start to seep into a team but it takes a lot more to turn a team around and start to raise moral and motivation. The following isn’t based on an in-depth study of development teams across the world but on my own personal experience of managing and observing a number of teams over the last 10 years.
The next speaker to say hello to is Andy Schmoll. Andy wears more hats in the Vienna games industry than we can list here, but the one she’s going to be speaking about as part of our “Day in the Life of…” sessions is the role of “Head of Communication” for Broken Rules in a session called “Being the Voice of an Indie Company”
My friends know I’ve been struggling to write this article for months, struggling with the tone and the question: so I ask you, Why? It’s the most important question you can ask yourself, though asking it is never easy.
In Part 1 we decided to represent a vector field as a superposition of individual effects:
G(p) = G_0(p) + G_1(p) + ... + G_n(p)
Here, each G_i(p) is a function that represents some effect, such as wind, an explosion or the updraft from an air vent.
Read more on A Data-Oriented, Data-Driven System for Vector Fields — Part 2…
Ever wondered what it is animators are actually responsible for in games? At the AltDev Student Summit, Mike Jungbluth will be on hand to tell you during his session “What is Game Animation?”. Read on for more info!
Education doesn’t end after college. In this session for the AltDev Student Summit, Jay Margalus and Phil Tibitoski will explain why, and what steps you should be taking to ensure you always know what you need to know. Read on for more info.
I’ve been gaming about 30 years now, ever since that Commodore Vic-20 made it’s appearance under our Christmas tree back in 1981-82. Video games have been a passion of mine since well before I decided to try my hand at creating them as a profession and during these past 30 years, video game reviews have evolved just as the games they reviewed. Back then, if a game shipped broken, it shipped broken. There was no patching, no do-overs so I relied on print reviews to help me save my money and time from busted games. Not to say I still wasn’t duped into buying a broken game from time to time (I’m looking at you, Atari ET. How many hours of my childhood were spent in those stupid pits?) but generally I trusted game reviews to help set me on the right path when it came to spending my gaming dollars. Today the internet is awash in review sites.
In the previous post, x64 ABI: Intro to the Windows x64 Calling Convention, I explained the rules of the Windows x64 calling convention. Now we’ll take a look at what makes up a stack frame.
Dustin Clingman is the first speaker we want to introduce you to. We’re very pleased to have Dustin as a speaker at the AltDev Student Summit, which you can now register for right now! Mark your diaries for November 10th/11th and come hear Dustin talk to you about “Managing Up”.
Last week we announced that as part of the AltDev Student Summit we would be holding a competition for students called the AltDev Student Showcase, but what’s a competition without prizes!?
This is a guest posting by Eddie, Novaleaf’s Game Dev Lead
Well, that’s currently what’s happening to our Kickstarter campaign, God of Puzzle. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what you need to know if you’re planning to start a Kickstarter campaign. This time, let’s talk about when your campaign doesn’t go as planned.
![[The Indie Survival Button in all its glory]](http://flippfly.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/preorder-today.png)
(This was originally posted on Flippfly.com)
When we started Flippfly as a company, our thoughts were mostly on IOS: The developer ecosystem is thriving, the barrier to entry is super low, the hardware is awesome, and there are millions upon millions of potential customers. But through our experience with our first release, Monkey Drum, we came to realize a few things:
Read more on Our Self-Publishing PC Adventure, Part 1…
Programming comments are a critical, and often overlooked, part of the development process. Comments may not be exciting enough to have certifications and training classes dedicated to them, but in many ways the difference between a good codebase and an excellent codebase can come down to the quality of the comments.
For every gameplay feature that makes it in, ten were cut so that it could survive. In the epic battle (or collaboration, depending on your team/company) between Designers, Programmers, and Animators to see these features get shipped, some core fundamentals often fall by the wayside. In games animation, it is very common to approach quality of movement in the wrong order; starting from the ground up.
Read more on Head Over Heels: Upper Body Movement In Gameplay…
A vector field is a function that assigns a vector value to each point in 3D space. Vector fields can be used to represent things like wind (the vector field specifies the wind velocity at each point in space), water, magnetism, etc.
Read more on A Data-Oriented, Data-Driven System for Vector Fields – Part 1…
HTML5 is an amazing technology for designing web sites. The general flexibility of HTML5 markup and JavaScript often leads web developers to create their content using individual image elements. This approach works well for small sites with low overhead, but for games or other high-load websites, using droves of single image elements leads to long load times and slow performance, resulting in a poor end-user experience. In an ecosystem where 3 seconds may cause you to lose half your users, it’s important to use the proper tool to address this issue: texture atlasing.
Read more on Building an HTML5 Game? Don’t Shrug Off Atlases….
A review of question #3 in the Twitter #gamedev Q&A…
A review of question #2 in the Twitter #gamedev Q&A…
This was the question that started my twitter #gamedev Q&A series. As of right now we’re just shy of having discussed 100 questions on twitter. Feel free to join in!
The AltDev Student Summit is a chance for students, regardless of location, to engage with veteran game developers from some of the best companies around the world and learn first-hand what being a part of our industry is really like. It will take place November 10th and 11th, and is all held online, through Google’s Hangouts On Air system.
Read more on Showcase Your Student Projects at AltDev Student Summit…
This post will present a small library called Flow that abuses .Net’s IEnumerable functionality, providing a Kernel for cooperative multitasking based on the concept of coroutines.
The concepts of Timer, Future<T>, Channel<T>, Barrier and Trigger, are introduced as well as process Nodes and Groups.
@dejobaan stepped up tonight and offered a $100 loan to an awesome indie #gamedev that really needed the money to pay their Greenlight fee to help make their dream happen. A few of us followed his excellent example (including @BenKuchera) and offered to do the same. You want to read his post Dejobaan Will Loan You $100 to Submit to Steam Greenlight
Read more on Want to donate to support indie #gamedev Greenlight fee?…
Porting your game to Native Client and Android just got a lot easier. The new OpenGL portability library ‘Regal’ emulates legacy GL features such as immediate mode and fixed function pipeline. Regal is the ‘Write Once, Run Everywhere’ GL library. Read on for more details on Regal and how it got ported to Native Client.
