You know that feeling when you've found exactly the tool you were looking for? And it's cheap too? Well I got that when I found WebStorm. It has precisely what I was looking for in a node.js IDE. Some of you (non existent) readers may say, "bah! IDE's are for teh noobz!" And who knows, maybe these phantom tech elitists are correct. Throughout college I used emacs and programmed in C++ and I liked it. But now I've been spoiled by Visual Studio and C# and I don't think I can ever go back.
So WebStorm has all the features I love about visual studio, but works well with Node.js, and on my mac. Code formatting, smart auto-complete, "jump to definition", easy to add JsDoc comments... I'm actually surprised I hadn't found it earlier, since most of the VS features I love are from a plugin called Resharper, which is made by the same company (JetBrains). And unlike VS, the price is pretty reasonable ($50).
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Sounds Like *Snatch*
I think I'm finally done polishing the game jam game. I was able to incorporate a bunch more of the assets Adam and Scott made that I hadn't been able to get to before. Plus you can actually win now. Getting to this point was kinda interesting. I had to quickly learn how to use two game creation tool. Being that we had a limited time, one of our first decisions was to go with a tool that allows rapid prototyping without needing to know too much of the inner works. So we started making the game with a tool called GameSalad. It's an interesting engine in that there's no real coding. Just rule creation. However, after about half a day, we realized it's features were too limiting. So I had to rapidly switch gears and learn something called Stencyl.
Stencyl has a lot more customization and an interesting visual programing form of writing it's scripts. It also had a much steeper learning curve though. I found myself often searching through their visual methods trying to find something that would work for what I wanted to do. Plus their documentation isn't the best. Most of it is pretty superficial and the only way to figure out the details is through trial and error. Also, I ran into a bunch of small but annoying bugs in their editor. It would really help if I got to know a more professional game engine before the next jam I do. But without further delay, here is the final(ish) product:
Stencyl has a lot more customization and an interesting visual programing form of writing it's scripts. It also had a much steeper learning curve though. I found myself often searching through their visual methods trying to find something that would work for what I wanted to do. Plus their documentation isn't the best. Most of it is pretty superficial and the only way to figure out the details is through trial and error. Also, I ran into a bunch of small but annoying bugs in their editor. It would really help if I got to know a more professional game engine before the next jam I do. But without further delay, here is the final(ish) product:
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
WammyJammy
Just completed my first game jam! It was a 48 hour one called WammyJammy with the theme being 'sound.' Kinda stressful, but fun. With being the only programmer on the team, and not having really made a game before, I was happy with the outcome. On my team was Adam Rickert (a graphics guy) and Scott Looney (a sound guy) who bith did some excellent work. I felt a little bad that I wasn't able to incorporate all their assets before the jam ended. But I'm planning to go back and finish it up, just for the hell of it. Here's the final product:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)