Tag Archives: 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 →

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 →

Sum All Numbers in a Range

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A solution to Free Code Camp’s “Sum All Numbers in a Range” JavaScript challenge, in a Functional Programming style.

A friend of mine hosts meetups for the Free Code Camp, which describes itself as:

We’re an open source community of people who learn to code and help nonprofits.

He organises casual meetings in coffee shops to allow participants to work on their assignments in a nice environment and help each other. If you’re looking to learn programming I recommend finding a Free Code Camp group in your area.

Today I visited such a meeting and one of the Code Campers was working on a solution for one of the JavaScript problems in the Intermediate Algorithm Scripting section. The task was to write a function that takes an array of 2 numbers as an argument and returns the sum of all the numbers between them, including the 2 numbers themselves. For example, an input of [3, 1] should result in 6, because 1 + 2 + 3 = 6. As a hint, it’s recommended you read the documentation for Math.min(), Math.max() and Array.prototype.reduce(). Continue reading →

Lean Poker

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I had a lot of fun attending a Lean Poker event last weekend!

Me at Lean Poker

Me at Lean Poker

It’s a type of event where programmers get together, form teams and spend the day writing code competitively, to see who can write the best automated online-poker player. We don’t play for money but for pride, and the main aim is to practise writing beautiful code and lean principles. That said, given the time constraint of a single day, the focus is usually on Deliver as fast as possible and by the end I’m flurrying around to keep errors out of the code. We try to get quick feedback during the day (more on that later) but I thought I’d do a write up about the event to give people who haven’t attended one of these before an idea of what it’s like!

Continue reading →