Doolwind

Pragmatic Thoughts On Game Development by Alistair Doulin

About Me

Alistair Doulin I build software. The best place to find me is on Twitter.
Posted on September 21, 2006 by Doolwind
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I Bid Thee Farewell (For Now)

As some of you may have noticed, my blogs have been a little sporadic over the past few months and for the next two weeks they are going to cease completely.  In two days time I will be a married man!  To those that prescribe to the belief that I’m ‘getting more time than one does for murder’ or that I’ll have a ball and chain attached I laugh in your general direction.  I shall return from my honeymoon with more game design ideas, more blogging ideas and a general enthusiasm like you’ve never seen before.  Until then, I hope that you are all well, that your game playing and developing goes smoothly and that you all prepare for exciting things to come from the new and improved Doolwind.

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Posted on September 16, 2006 by Doolwind
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Pair Programming – Try It Now

For only the 5th time in my life as a programmer I took part in some pair programming this week.  I had forgotten just how much benefit there is from pair programming and decided to share some of my experiences.  Pair programming simply means two coders, sitting down at the computer together with one person typing and both people discussing everything they do.  Below is a list of reasons why I highly recommend everyone tries pair programming and adopts it as a part of their best practices.  While there isn’t a need to do it all the time I’d recommend trying it next time you are designing a large system or trying to solve a complex problem.

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Posted on September 5, 2006 by Doolwind
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Qualities of a Good Game Programmer

After the excellent response to the programmer’s personality test I wrote I thought I’d look a little more into the beast that is a games programmer. Rather than giving a list of questions to be answered I thought I’d give a list of the qualities I’ve seen in good game programmers over the years. Some of these qualities extend to general software development and others to people in general. As usual feel free to leave comments or email me here with any thoughts.

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Posted on August 30, 2006 by Doolwind
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Flexibility vs. Speed

In software development there are many goals that we aim for in designing our software, some of which compete against each other. Two such goals are flexibility and speed. While they may not always be in competition, I’ve found in the past that they quite often are, and particularly so when it comes to game development. What exactly do I mean by these two terms? Flexibility can mean anything from allowing multiple development languages to cross-platform support. When I talk about speed I’m talking about actual run-time performance of your application. Today I’m going to speak specifically about my time adding both GameMonkey (GM) for scripting support and minimax for AI.

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Posted on August 20, 2006 by Doolwind
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Less Is More

I’ve played a few demos over the past weeks and I’ve found a recurring theme in the good ones; that less is more. To aid in my explanation I’m going to compare two demos that have come out recently; Company of Heroes (CoH) by Relic (makers of Warhammer 40K) and Paraworld by SEK (makers of a few games you wouldn’t have heard of).

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Posted on July 25, 2006 by Doolwind
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Best Game of 2006?

Sign up for the Hyperbol beta, download it, and play it. I found this a few weeks ago and thought it was so-so after playing for 30 mins or so, however after playing a few games on the LAN at work, I’ve seen the full depth of the game, and it is the best game that’s come out this year (even though it’s not officially finished yet). The game is like a cross between scorched earth and space invaders.
Press the ‘beta’ button on the main site, it takes less than 24 hours to sign up usually. Try it out, let me know what you think, and if you want a game shoot me an email here.

Posted on July 20, 2006 by Doolwind
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Cavemen Review

As I mentioned a few weeks back Cavemen by Lightworks Games has just been released. To encourage everyone to buy it, and to help give feedback to one of the creators (Walter, who used to sit next to me back on MVH) I thought I’d write up a quick review.

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Posted on July 4, 2006 by Doolwind
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How To Enjoy Games Again

Has anyone else found themselves wondering where all the good games have gone? Other than a few diamonds in the rough (Oblivion, Civ4, Galactic Civilizations 2) there seems to have been a distinct lack of excellent games of late. For the past few years I’ve been working on ways to enjoy games as I used to, below are a list of 6 simple steps to follow. Read More

Posted on May 14, 2006 by Doolwind
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Good Game GUI Design

All games have user interfaces, from first person shooters to puzzle games and hardcore simulations. Their quality ranges from excellent down to looking like they’ve been hastily put together by programmers themselves at the end of a project.  Sometimes they seem to only be there to let players have access to the internal workings of the game, almost as an after thought. In this article I’ll discuss why World of Warcraft’s GUI works so well and why games as old as Sim Ant (1991) started the trend in excellent design.

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