ProjectXyz

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RPG Development Progress Pulse – Entry 2

Progress Pulse - Entry 2 Things have been pretty busy in real life the past couple of weeks, so I haven't had too much time for working on this. However, for this entry in the progress pulse series I'll talk about some of the challenges I had while looking at making a generic data (de)serialization API + implementation, and why I chose to make some of the decisions I did! Which Tech To Pick? I've felt burned in the past by trying to do data serialization for my game framework because it's always created a barrier for refactoring once it's in place (i.e. i change some data i need and now i have to re-make or migrate allllll my SQL data). So I was thinking about how I plan to store game state, which I have written about, and then…

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July 17, 2018
Programming / Progress Pulse

RPG Development Progress Pulse – Entry 1

Progress Pulse - Entry 1 For the first entry in the progress pulse series I'll touch on some things from the past week or so. There's been a lot of smaller things being churned in the code base, some of them interesting, and others less interesting so I want to highlight a few. As a side note, it's really cool to see that the layout and architecture is allowing for features to be added pretty easily, so I'll dive a bit deeper on that. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how things are going. Unity3D - Don't Fight It! I heard from a colleague before that Unity3D does some things you might not like, but don't try to fight it, just go with it. To me, that's a challenge. If I'm going to be spending time coding in something I want…

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June 28, 2018
Programming / Progress Pulse

RPG Development Progress Pulse

Progress Pulse Series I figured this would be a fun thing to start to do just to get small updates out and talk about what I've been working on for ProjectXyz and my RPG I'm building in Unity3D. This will hopefully be some small updates on the order of semi to bi-weekly about what kinds of things are going on when I'm programming for these projects. This could include: How and why I decided to refactor something A new design practice I'm trying Reflecting on why a design decision has(n't) been working out A new feature that's interesting etc... Some of these will be technical and others much less. A bit of progress pulse allows me an outlet to talk about interesting things I'm doing and maybe sheds some light on some areas (game development or just general programming) that…

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June 27, 2018
Leadership / Perspective / Programming / Tips

ProjectXyz: Why I Started A Team For My Hobby Project

Who Needs A Team?! I've been building RPG backends for as long as I've been able to code. I think my first one that I made for my grade 11 class is the only RPG that I "finished"... It was text-based and all you could do was fight AI via clicking attack, buy better weapons, level up, and repeat. It was also 10000 lines of VB6 code and so brutal that I couldn't add anything to it without copying hundreds of lines of code. Since then, I've had the itch. I keep rewriting this thing. I keep taking "Text RPG" (super cool and catchy, I know) and rewriting it. I had my first visual representation of this game called Macerus (here's another rewrite for unity), which is actually how I landed my first co-op job. But every time I'd get…

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June 20, 2018
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Part 1 – Exploring Graphs and Trees

Graphs and Trees to Start I was chatting with my colleague about generating maps for a 2D role playing game the other day after getting super excited explaining picking ProjectXyz back up and looking into Unity3D more. He was expressing interest in algorithms for procedural generation and storing data in trees or graphs as an optimal data structure for the scenario we were going over. It stuck with me though. I've been putting a lot of thought into game state management and wanting to address it by using a generic layering/stacking approach. By that, I mean that I want to find a way to take base game state, allow mods or plugins to overlay their state, allow game patches to overlay their state, and then save game data to be overlaid on top of all of that. Conceptually, I believe…

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June 5, 2018
Programming / Tips / Unity3D

Unity3D and .NET 4.x Framework

Unity3D Default .NET Framework I recently wrote that I wanted to start writing more Unity3D articles because I'm starting to pick up more Unity3D hobby work. It felt like a good opportunity to share some of my learnings so that anyone searching across the web might stumble upon this and get answers to the same problems I had. Unity3D as of 2018.1.1f1 (which is the version I'm currently using), still defaults to using .NET 3.5 as the framework version. Nothing wrong with that either. I'm sure there are reasons that they have for staying at that version, probably because of Mono and cross platform reasons if I were to guess, so I'm not complaining. For reference, this setting in Unity3D is referred to as "Scripting Runtime Version". So if you're googling more about this later, that's what Unity calls it.…

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June 2, 2018
Programming

ProjectXyz: Enforcing Interfaces (Part 2)

Enforcing Interfaces This is my second installment of the series related to my small side project that I started. I mentioned in the first post that one of the things I wanted to try out with this project is coding by interfaces. There's an article over at CodeProject that I once read (I'm struggling to dig it up now, arrrrrghh) that really gave me a different perspective about using interfaces when I program. Ever since then I've been a changed man. Seriously. The main message behind the article was along the lines of: Have your classes implement your interface, and to be certain nobody is going to come by and muck around with your class's API, make sure they can't knowingly make an instance of the class. One of the easiest ways to do this (and bear with me here, I'm…

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November 12, 2014
Programming

ProjectXyz: Why I Started a Side Project (Part 1)

ProjectXyz Alright, I'll admit it... Even for a placeholder name on a side project it's pretty terrible, right? Well, my apologies. So, if you made it to this post you might be wondering what ProjectXyz is and why I started it up. From a high level, I started working on ProjectXyz so that I could have a hobby programming project to tinker with and I figured I'd blog about my adventures in bringing it all together. I plan on making this a mini-series documenting some of the things I'm learning or experimenting with, so this will serve as the intro to the series. Before we get too far, here's the link to the GitHub site: https://github.com/ncosentino/ProjectXyz Why Have a Side Project? Here's the main thing I want to talk about in part 1 of this series: Why should you have a…

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November 9, 2014

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