Quick Debugging Tip

If you have a minor bug that you just can't fix, step away from it. When you are relaxed and thinking of something else, the answer will pop into your head.

Recommended Programming Books

People often ask me what games programming books I would recommend. To be honest most of them aren't worth reading and are often written by people who have never shipped a game. After all being a game programmer is a more well paid and rewarding job than being an author so it's hardly surprising.

There are exceptions of course, usually when a seasoned game developer wants to give something back to the community. Here is my (albeit short) list:

Game Engine Architecture is written by a guy who worked at Naughty Dog and is very comprehensive.

Game Coding Complete is written by a guy who worked at the legendary Origin Systems and contains some great anecdotes about his time there.

Game Programming Patterns is a newish book and also a really good read, I especially like the introduction. There is a free online version here.

The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses is easily the best book on game design I have read, rather than tell you how to design games it teaches you how to evaluate you own game designs.

There are some good general programming books of course, especially Scott Meyers books on C++, I'll probably cover general technical books in a later article.

Metabuilder

Before we started working on Geometry Wars 3 we realised that one of the biggest challenges we would face would be to maintain all the code projects for the platforms we were developing for.

Most of the team had worked on cross-platform games before and had used various build systems - cmake, jam as well as various proprietary build systems. We came to the conclusion that nothing we could find that was available to us would satisfy our requirements. We decided that we needed to develop our own build system.

One of our programmers wrote Metabuilder, it is essentially a Lua scriptable system for generating Visual Studio & XCode projects as well as makefiles. It was absolutely instrumental in getting GW3 delivered on time on all the platforms we were developing for.

We decided before starting work on it that we wanted it to be made publicly available and you can get it on GitHub from here.

New Year, New Blog

One of the things I decided to do this year is to try and share my knowledge and experience of game development in an attempt to help others who are trying to get started in this exciting and fun-packed world!

I've been developing games professionally for nearly 20 years. Initially I worked at Bizarre Creations and was a Lead Programmer there until it was closed down. After that I set up Lucid Games with a number of other ex-colleagues from Bizarre and my current role there is Programming Director.

This is the first blog I have written so it will be a bit of an experiment. Since I don't have a huge amount of time I will try and keep entries short and informative.