New projects bearing our personal touch...

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0100

It's been a while since we've announced anything, owing largely to the fact that most of our work has been property of someone else for a while now, but today is probably as good as any to point out places where you can find our handiwork in recent months.

I just saw Wipeout The Game (based on the TV show) recently hit the shelves for the Wii a couple of weeks ago. The coolest part about that game is their water rendering tech. Of course I'd say that, it's min [...]

Keyboard porn

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Fri, 28 May 2010 00:00:00 +0100

My hands are aching, legs are shot, and I'm pretty tired right now. I've just finished completely rebuilding two of my three new IBM Model M clicky keyboards! I'd have posted some before and after pics, but I didn't want to frighten anyone. The before pics are horrifying, and the after looks just like a brand new clicky Model M. But in case anyone in the Austin area (or not) is looking for some more of these ancient but awesome 'boards, Comptuers 4 Kids has quite a few still kicking aroun [...]

Corsair F100 SSD performance

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Thu, 20 May 2010 00:00:00 +0100

We just bought new machines a couple of weeks back. They're pretty sweet. I don't normally splurge on things, but I do like to buy quality that serves a purpose. So, rather than buying a typical off-the-shelf Dell or even an HP workstation, I decided to have some built by my good friend Jeremy Siprelle who knows how to build such things. I'm a demanding customer, though, and wanted some top shelf parts and some solid but economical parts.

The case is a Silverstone Raven [...]

Hey baby, talk geek to me.

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Thu, 06 May 2010 00:00:00 +0100

In the midst of having a spirited discussion with a friend, a handful of quotable quotes came up. I was just presumptuous enough to think it might be interesting to a handful of the nerdly-wise. Enjoy or don't.

"What I've noticed is that the best programmers refactor once. Lousy ones, frequently. Terrible ones, never. "

"The quality of a programmer is not just determined by how quickly and effectively he can write code, but also by how well he underst [...]

Still Hiring...

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 +0100

I bet you were reading this and thinking to yourself, "I wonder who I know that would like to work in the games industry with some fairly veteran talent, but doesn't want to be forced into doing some run-of-the-mill AAA project that is rehashing a tired old property, or has a numeral exceeding 3 in the title". Thanks for that. Go ahead and check our job postings and pass on the link to your friends that totally kick ass. We like people that totally kick ass, chock full of Chucknorium.

Slides from the edge...

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Last night went fairly well. There were two other speakers before me. They went on quite a long time, and unfortunately some folks had to leave early, being a school night and all... But those who hung around were a great audience.

I put a good deal more time into the slides than what shows from the version hosted up here, as a PDF. I'd prefer to host it as a PPT file, since there's a [...]

Speaking tonight to 3D Austin Users Group

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0100

It looks like my good friend Brad Clark finally roped me into talking in front of an audience of graphics professionals. Consequently, I've spent too many hours working on a slide presentation about my thoughts on running an independent game studio, how my goals and expectations have changed over the years, and what lessons I've learned in the process of both succeeding and failing at the job.

I'm not certain at this point whether I'll present this again in a different fo [...]

Game Engine Gems 1 is out!

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Yesterday, I had a pleasant surprise on my way to work. Opening the front door and making a mad dash to the car is pretty routine in Texas: in summer, it's to avoid the blazing sun and heat, in winter it'll be the rain (or lately, snow?). As I pushed open the door, there was unexpected and substantial resistance... aha! A cardb [...]

How to use wxGrid correctly

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0100

WxWidgets is a beautiful thing. Coupled with wxFormBuilder, you can make relatively complex GUI applications in a fraction of the time a traditional C++ app would take... still not as quick to build as C#, but then again, if you have a huge library of useful C++ code lying around, the relative value of C# is dimin [...]

Picking a 3D object with a 2D pointer

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Yes, it's another episode of Can't Google My Way Out, with your host Jason Hughes!

While working on our editor, we just recently got to the point where we needed to do mouse selection of objects. There were two methods I was considering for accomplishing this: 1) the obvious method that involves ray casting from the near-plane out to the far-plane and selecting the nearest object the ray hits, and 2) rendering all objects to a render target that has object IDs stored per- [...]

We're certified!

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Good news for us! We're officially licensed Sony developers for PS3 and PSP. Now, as a studio we're able to work on every major piece of hardware (except the DS, which doesn't interest me). Very cool indeed.

So, what are we working on? Uh... can't say much, but that we're putting a lot of effort into building an editor. Finally, we're taking the time to accelerate our development. Funny when you say that out loud, but it's true. It's really amazing how time consumi [...]

Weird behavior in MSVC 2005 SP1

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

So, during a refactor of a large section of code, I ran into an oddity with Microsoft's Visual Studio compiler in the way templates, default parameters, and namespace/class works. Really odd, particularly because it had been my (naive) understanding that a namespace and a class are quite close to the same thing if your functions are all declared to be static inside the class... truthfully, I (and most people I've talked to) believe that a class wrapping a bunch of static functions is just a nic [...]

Sample map

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

I fixed most of the unsightly bugs and added a few features today, so I guess now it's worth posting a map. And no, we don't plan on making a rogue-like game. We needed a quick way to experiment with level sizes for a game without putting a lot of time into an artist building it by hand, so I auto-generate levels at various sizes and we 'play' through it as quickly as we can to get a sense of scale and rapidly find the magical Goldilocks values. We also need to know if large rooms with lot [...]

Fun with dungeon generators

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Today/tonight, I spent about 12 hours writing a random dungeon generator, very much in the style of a Rogue-like game. I've done it before, sorta, but never was impressed with the results. I think that was partly because I expected too much from such simple algorithms I was implementing. This go-round, however, I used industrial strength techniques and added a little control through parameters I pass in. The end result is a kind of nice set of maps. Once I clean up the rendering, I'll tr [...]

Fighting 20 year old bad Microsoft code

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0100

It's been one of those rare days when things go from bad to worse just when you think the problems are licked. But a fun day, nonetheless. Let me explain.

I'm writing my second article for Game Engine Gems, one about an advanced palettizer technique that works for colors and non-colors alike, and does a remarkable job... but I'll save the details for the article. What is important is that today, I had to generate a couple of sample images to compare with Photoshop. My good frien [...]

A New Day

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0100

It's been a hard but exciting development season. This whole year, we've been working with RedFly Studio to bring their Food Network: Cook or Be Cooked title to life by providing the majority of progamming for the game. Meanwhile, we also did a complete port from PC to Wii retail for North America (EU coming soon, we hope) of Dr. Fizzwizzle's Animal Rescue, for Replay Games (correction).

Right now, Jeff and I also are wrapping up the final build for a November 3rd r [...]

typedefs are weak

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0100

So, there's a lot of issues with C++ and the poor support for creating new types. Particularly, it's often useful to make a type-safe integer... for example, if you have several different functions that do similar things and are easy to confuse the values, since an int is an int is an int. It'd be really nice to have the compiler help you when you pass an integer you got from one function into another that means a totally different thing.

Let's get more specific, since all this dan [...]

Tap.. tap.. tap.. this thing on?

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Hooboy... looks like some folks picked up on the last post and got the wrong idea. I want to first be clear to anyone who didn't realize I was taking a poke at ourselves as much as anyone else when expressing disappointment about B&S's performance. We made the game, and in a sense it was an experiment (I'll explain below), but there's nobody to blame for the final product except us. We built something from nothing and shipped it. Whether it was a blockbuster or not, I'm very proud of [...]

What are we up to?

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Some folks have been asking about Bruiser & Scratch, about what we're up to right now, and about what we're planning to do in the near and far future. Some folks are just complaining that I don't post enough. Given that there's no good way to answer all of this to each person individually, and that I'm pretty sure we can release the information, here's the scoop.

Bruiser & Scratch has been available on WiiWare for a while, and as expected, we haven't been blow [...]

Visual Studio rebuilds forever

jhughes@steelpennygames.com — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

A small tidbit for frustrated developers. I have Visual Studio 2005 and generally like it a lot... still lacks some of the features that we had in 1995 with VC6, but the improvements have grown on me. However, occasionally I'll run into a serious snag that makes no sense and I have to spend hours or days worrying about it. Here's one of them, and how to solve it:

I have a large solution with about 50 projects in it, mostly libraries. I had all the dependencies set correc [...]

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