The title screen! At this point in game development, it’s probably a waste of time, especially if you’ve already decided to implement a handler system that will let you slot the title screen in at the end. But what’s done is done, so here it is! Obviously a work of art. In this post, I’d […]
Handling transitions between various screens was one of the problems my friends and I encountered when developing our shmup game at university. For instance, it was a pain getting the game flow moving from the title screen to the game screen, from game screen to loading screen, and so on. Because of the way we […]
Recently I embarked upon a quest: a quest to produce a platform game, the likes of which the world had never known. However, I got bored of that, but not before exercising my Python chops. Although I failed, I discovered the wonderful pygame library. Pygame is a Python wrapper for the ever-popular C++ SDL library, […]
Back in secondary school, I was part of an ill-fated three man chess club. We were terrible. Our supervisor, while well intentioned, was beatable by complete rank amateurs (read: us). It was not an environment under which we could grow as players, but we were having a blast, so who cared? Fast forward over ten […]
As a would-be hardcore gamer, for me shoot ’em ups, or ‘shmups’, are a fascinating intersection of complexity, fun and playability. With humble roots in Space Invaders, shmups began with a simple premise: The player controls a ship (or perhaps a flying witch or android) and must defend themselves against wave after wave of enemy […]
What’s all this speed-running malarkey about? As you may or may not know, back in the day (read: 9 months ago) I started to speed-run Super Meat Boy, a fast-paced platform game starring a walking cube of meat, on a mission to save his equally cubular, bandage-covered girlfriend from the evil (or maybe just misunderstood!) […]
Going in to The Charisma Myth (Olivia Fox Cabane, Penguin Books), I was naturally wary of the hype surrounding it. Many of the Amazon reviews claim the book’s advice will enrich your life, that it will make you more charismatic, or it will help you land that dream job. This sort of guarantee is slapped on to virtually […]
This is the first post of my new blog! My name is Matthew, thank you for stopping by. You’re reading this because either you’re starting this journey with me, or you have joined recently and have taken the time to read back through the archives. You late joiners will have a very important advantage over […]