妖怪世捨て人

Another month already gone by. Unlike last month, I have managed to work on a few things this month, though it isn't much yet. So, in order to bolster the content a bit, I thought I'd also talk about the rough roadmap I have for Kandria.

It's a new month, and that usually means I'm supposed to write a monthly update on the progress with Kandria. Thinking about that though made me feel very depressed because I realised that I hadn't really done anything at all for the game, all of April.

It's April! … already. Man alive, March shaped up to be quite the month, didn't it. For reasons you can probably already guess at, not too much progress was made this month, but after the splash of excitement that was last month, I don't feel too bad about that. Well, actually I do, but I'll try my best to tamper my disappointment and just move on.

Another month has flown by, and this one has turned out to be much more exciting than I ever anticipated! Primarily this is due to me making a surprise decision to try and apply for a grant to help get this project funded. This prompted a lot of changes, which I'll talk about today.

I think it's time for another quick update on the game! There isn't all that much to go through, as I've been rather occupied with other matters, such as university exams. Besides that I've also been struggling with figuring out the core story, setting, and direction I want the game to go in.

It has been a while since I last wrote an update on my game project, Leaf. It's also now been a year since I first started to work on it! I think it's about high time I talked about what's been happening, and what I plan to happen in the near future, too.

Last year I, mostly on a whim, decided to make a small physical desktop calendar. Much to my surprise quite a few people were interested in it, even some from Japan, China, the US, and various countries in Europe. However, last year was pretty stressful, as I came up with the idea for the calendar a bit too late, and had to really hurry to get it all together in time for the new year. This year I decided to try again, and fix the mistakes I made last year.

Recently there's been a few changes to the libraries I maintain, as well as to the new libraries I publish. I thought that these changes would be of general interest, even if you might not use my libraries at all.

It's been two months now since I started to do daily game development streams. I've been trying my best, but it is time for this to come to a close. In this article I'll talk about the various things that happened, why I'm stopping, and the future of the Leaf game. Strap in!

This article was originally published on GameDev.NET. In it, I illustrate a new particle system that was developed for my Lisp game engine, Trial. It contains quite a bit of graphics stuff, but also a lot of Lisp. I thought it would be worthwhile to share it here as well. For those unfamiliar, a particle system deals in orchestrating a lot of very similar things (particles). The challenge is to efficiently draw and update these particles.

That didn't feel as long as it was. A month ago I promised to do daily streams of game development. So far I've held true to that. I'm sure I won't be able to hold that true forever, but I'll try to keep going for as long as I can. In this one month alone, a lot has changed for the game though!

Starting tomorrow I will be doing daily live game development streams for my current game project, Leaf. The streams will happen from 20:00 to 22:00 CEST, at https://stream.shinmera.com. There's also a short summary and countdown page here.

Common Lisp has a big standard, but sometimes that standard still doesn't cover everything one might need to be able to do. And so, various implementations offer various extensions in various ways to help people get their work done. A lot of these extensions are similar and compatible with each other, just with different interfaces. Thus, to make libraries work on as many implementations as possible, portability libraries have been made, and are still being made.

It's already 2019, and last year I decided, for the first time ever, to sell some of my art. Apparently more people wanted to buy my art than I expected, so I thought it would be a good idea to write a bit about it all and my future plans.

Recently there's been a bit of a storm brewing about a rather opinionated article about game development with Lisp. After reading Chris Bagley's very well done response, I thought I'd share my perspective on what it's like to actually make games with Lisp. I'm not writing this with the intent on convincing you of any particular arguments, but rather to give some insight into my process and what the difficulties and advantages are.

About two weeks ago I said to myself: “You like games, don't you, son? Why don't you try making one yourself again for once? Just something simple, a platformer maybe. Just make a game and don't spend all of your time writing an engine and all that crap that isn't the game itself.” And I replied to myself by spending the last two weeks writing an engine. But, I still really want to make an actual game, so this entry is going to be about that.

A while back I wrote a bit about my adventures with a game engine technique called Geometry Clipmaps and my difficulties in implementing them. After spending what was supposed to be a week wherein I create a game fixing and completing an implementation of the Clipmaps instead, I think I'm now ready to talk about it. I'll also try to answer the questions I posed in the previous entry.

After an excruciating two months of impending exam, I now finally have proper holidays; time during which I don't need to do anything in particular. No deadlines, no requirements. And yet, I can't seem to relax. Why?

Man, it's been a good while since I sat down and wrote one of these whine entries. Well, I guess it's time again. It being such a long time since I last had to write about something like this naturally seems like a good thing, but I think matters are a bit more complicated than that. I suppose I should elaborate on that.

A while back I attempted to implement a technique called Geometry Clipmaps in Trial. This technique is used to stream in terrain data for scenery where the terrain is far too large to be stored in memory all at once, let alone be rendered at full resolution. In this entry I'll go over the idea of the technique and the problems I had implementing it.

This is a follow-up to my previous entry, where I talked about the shader pipeline system. However, I specifically excluded the way resources for shaders are allocated in that article. We'll get to that now, since I finally got around to rewriting that part of the engine to be more complete.

In the last entry I talked about Trial's way of handling shaders and how they are integrated into the object system to allow inheritance and composition. This time we'll take a look at how that system is extended to allow entire pipelines of effects and rendering systems.

In this entry I'll describe the way in which shaders are integrated into the object system in Trial. It serves as a predecessor to the next entry, which will be about shader pipelines.

Welcome to a new article series! I've decided to try to record my thoughts on various matters about game development. This will include observations, discoveries, explanations of existing systems, and proposals for improvements in related projects. Most of this will be directly related to Shirakumo's game engine Trial and the Treehouse gamedev streams. This first entry is a proposal for a new resource management system in Trial.

Well, it looks like 2017 is just about over. I thought it might be a nice opportunity to look back on the drawings I've made throughout the year and have a little discussion about it. This year has been especially tough on me and for long stretches of time I could not get myself to draw anything at all for a lack of motivation, inspiration, and confidence in general. And so in this article I'll talk a bit about a few pieces I found notable in an effort to see if there's anything obvious that could help me get along better in the next year.