News Archive
Time Sink (one second GIF creator)
As a fun side project for today, I thought it would be cool to create a page where you could code an animation in sink (my scripting language), and have it output an animated GIF.
It only took a few hours of hacking away to get it to work – it’s pretty fun!
Here’s the result of the simple 19 line script pictured above:
BW Wave Example
Paranoia Game Engine and Placebo Editor
Sorry for the lack of updates – I’ve been busy working.
Around mid-September I decided the best way forward was to create a game engine. That might sound a little crazy (because game engines are usually huge and take large teams), but I’m scoping the engine specifically for the Delusion game series.
It is not an Unreal or Unity style of engine, that is capable of making any game under the sun… it is closer to SCI or SCUMM. These types of engines are for fairly specific types of games, with a lot of built-in assumptions.
I’m calling the game engine Paranoia. It will be closed source, at least for now – but people will be able to develop games against it if they want.
I’m making an open-source game editor, specifically designed to output games for Paranoia to run, and it’s called Placebo. It is still very early in development, but it’s moving nicely.
Placebo Room Editor
I’m currently hoping to have a workable Paranoia+Placebo codebase by the end of the year, so that I can start creating episodes for Delusion beginning January 1st. As I create episodes, I’ll keep updating and improving both products. By the time I launch Delusion, they should be ready for other people to use as well.
Sink is the primary scripting language used inside both products, so I’ll be updating that as time goes on too!
Sink and Estimating Work
I’ve reached a point where Sink (my latest attempt at making a scripting language) is actually usable. It’s published on GitHub, here:
I want to take a moment to talk about how terrible I am at estimating how long I need to finish something. I don’t think this problem is strictly a personal failure – most programmers are quite bad at making estimates – but it certainly feels like a personal failure 😀.
On July 19th, I estimated I only needed 14 work days to finish Sink. Instead, it took me 24 work days. That’s an error of 70%.
On July 19th I also estimated I have 122 total days worth of work until my game engine is complete. That meant I could finish my game engine by the New Year. If my error rate is consistent, that means it will instead take me until May of 2017. That is a serious problem.
It’s something you consistently hear from other game developers, because it is true:
Game development is hard. It takes significantly longer than you expect. Cut your features by 75% and extend your project schedule by 200%.