News Archive

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:

Sink on GitHub

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%.


Polygon Clipping - Part 2

The previous polygon clipping algorithm turned out to fail at common cases, so I was forced to research and develop a different one:

Polygon Clipping (Part 2)

Sorry for the lack of updates – I have been working hard, and updating the website takes time away from building my tools and games. The latest article also took a long time, with lots of false starts and frustration, but it’s done now 😀.


Polygon Clipping

I had to implement a polygon clipping algorithm for my game, so I thought I might as well take the time to write an article on the subject:

Polygon Clipping

(Writing an article also forces me to deeply understand it too!)

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