It’s been a pretty busy 2 weeks. I’ve basically either been finishing up end of year blog posts or programming. Let’s jump in! Extra Life Donation Tracker I have the 5.3 release of my Extra Life Donation Tracker. I had a few minor refactoring goals for that release, but also a few user-facing enhancements. I …
Continue reading “Programming in the first two weeks of 2021”
Back in 2019, when I did my programming retrospective I made a few predictions. How did those go? Work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker? Yup! See below! Write more C++ thanks to Arduino? Not so much. C# thanks to Unity? Yes, but not in the way I thought. I only did minor work on …
Continue reading “My Programming Projects and Progress in 2020”
As you recall from the previous blog post, I’d installed Unity and JetBrains on my Fedora 32 computer via Flatpaks. I was going to use them for the Unity Multiplayer course I was taking on Udemy. Unfortunately it was an immediate fail and in lesson one after they have me install a new inputs library …
Continue reading “Followup On Unity and JetBrains Rider on Fedora”
As I mentioned last year in my 2019 in Programming post, I created a bunch of 2D games in Unity by following along with the Gamedev.tv classes. I would watch the videos on Linux and jump over to my Windows computer for the programming, learning how to use SourceTree and Microsoft Video Studio in the …
Continue reading “Unity and JetBrains Rider on Fedora via Flathub”
This was a VERY busy year for my coding. This year I had over 769 commits to GitHub; my previous best was 58 in 2014. The commits were very unevenly distributed. If you look at the graph of my commits, outside of a busy week in January and another in May, I didn’t really start …
The sixth, and final, game of the Udemy class on Unity 2D was a tileset Metroid-Vania game which the instructors named Tilevania. I never played Metroid and maybe only played Castlevania once, but its legacy does persist in some newer games like Spelunky. This was the closest I’ve come to making a Mario clone. My …
The fifth video game I made in Unity was another clone of a game I spent a lot of time playing, this time as an adult – Plants vs Zombies. For comparison, here’s Plants vs Zombies: and here’s my finished Glitch Garden: We learned a lot of techniques and reinforced even more, but the biggest …
The fourth game we worked on was another game that I spent a lot of my childhood playing. We made a Galaxian/Galaga clone: My mom’s youngest brother had a Nintendo and lots of arcade ports. When I was young he lived in the condo above my grandmother’s condo and whenever we’d go visit her, I’d …
My journey through 2D game development using the Unity engine continued with our third project: a clone of Brick Breaker or Arkanoid. In case you’ve never seen it before, this is Arkanoid: It’s got a pretty important legacy, Breakout, the version that Atari created, was an important stepping stone for the two Steves of Apple …
I’ve been playing video games since I was somewhere around 5 or 6 years old and got a Nintendo Entertainment System for my birthday from one of my aunts. I also inherited a Tandy computer from my dad when I was younger. We had a bunch of edutainment games – like this Sesame Street game …
note: I wrote this on 17 April, a full week before it is published on the blog Nearly six years ago I bought my first laptop. I’d never seen the point of laptops over desktops – the value per dollar just isn’t there. But I was going to be traveling for work now and again …
I have not yet tried out Gnome Shell or Ubuntu Unity, but the biggest complaint most people level against them is that our desktops are being tablet-ified. Sure, there need to be new, innovative interfaces for tablets and phones, but that’s no reason to abandon the desktop. Sure, perhaps the average Joe (or Jane) will …
