Category Archives: Tech

Tech related posts, mostly computers and programming

It’s better to use floats for maths and leave ints for indices

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Someone showed me a bug in my recent game, Freefall, whereby you can get as far as you like, by just changing speeds continuously, you don’t even need to look at the screen, just tap with a consistent tempo to keep changing speeds. This works because the projectile speeds are set with integers which means they have:

  1. A base speed at which they will hit you with the parachute
  2. Fast (double base) speed they will you with if in free fall
  3. Anything faster than this will miss you because it will get off the screen before it reaches you and is therefore only in there for decoration / to confuse the player

I used integers for practically everything in the game because the low resolution meant that even moving one pixel at a time is a pretty big step (there are only 48px in the vertical axis) and you can’t draw smaller than that.

During testing I focussed on checking that 1 & 2 would hit you at their respective speeds and that you could dodge them if you changed at the last moment. If you change speeds so infrequently the problem is less apparent. Continue reading →

Launched a new game: Freefall

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On 27 February I released a new Nokia 3310-style game: Freefall. In this game you control a parachute for humanitarian airdops in hostile territory. It’s my entry to Nokia 3310 Jam 5 and the theme was Fast & Slow so the main game action revolves around controlling the speed of the airdop between parachuting and freefall to dodge bullets coming from both sides.

The aim of the Nokia 3310 Jam is to have fun making a game using the restrictions of a Nokia 3310, so green, low-res, 1-bit screen, monophonic and only 12 keypad buttons. My entry placed 28th out of a 147 submissions and I’m especially proud of this because I did the music, animations, programming and game design all by myself. The game is open source and you can read it in the GitHub repository.

Always prefer accessing GitHub over SSH than HTTPS

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This is to avoid accidentally cloning a repo as read-only when GitHub defaults to HTTPS links, and then having to edit the gitconfig later to get an SSH URL you can push to. Add these 2 lines to your global .gitconfig file in your home folder to override all github.com URLs from HTTPS to SSH:

[url "ssh://git@github.com/"]
     insteadOf = https://github.com/

Why though?

Note, this is not for all git remotes, only GitHub. I have a similar setting for the GitHub Enterprise instance we use at work. Generally though, for most remote servers I’m fine with whatever it gives me, which is usually HTTPS.

The difference becomes important if I ever want to contribute (i.e. push) to the cloned repo, as is mostly the case when cloning my own repos or work code. Continue reading →

Ebiten vs PyGame

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The following is a copy of a response I wrote to a university student asking in the Ebiten Discord server whether they should use Ebiten or PyGame for their first time making a game:

Having used both I can say that PyGame provides much more out of the box but that this is not just a pro but also a con. For example in pygame there is a concept of “sprite” that has movement and you can tell it move left, move right etc. In Ebiten it surprised me to find that there is no such thing but it’s nice for two reasons: Continue reading →

Launched a new game: Cr1ckt

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Direct link to game: https://sinisterstuf.itch.io/cr1ckt

On the 1st of December Tristan, Rowan and I released the first version of Cr1ckt, a tricky platformer where you need to jump to avoid water and get to the fruit. It’s our submission for the GitHub Game Off 2021 game jam, an annual challenge to make a game based on a secret theme within the month of November. The theme this year is “BUG” so apart from playing as a cricket it also has some fun, intentional bugs.

It’s got downloads for major desktop platforms Windows, Linux & Mac, as well as Android. They’re quite small so you should be able to download and play quite fast. You can get the downloads or play online in your browser on the game page at sinisterstuf.itch.io/cr1ckt.

As hobbyist game developers in our free time this is one of the Continue reading →