… are still globals.
Or, more specifically, singletons are global variables. Really, that statement shouldn’t surprise anyone. But, every once in a while, usually in the middle of designing or researching code templates for creating singletons, people can forget what the singleton pattern was actually designed to accomplish. Continue reading
Ah, the QCF+Punch (Quarter-circle Forward and Punch). Also known as the “Hadouken” motion or “Fireball” motion. It’s a standard in fighting games to have a tier of special moves tied to complicated input commands like QCF+Punch. The extra difficulty in executing the command lends a greater sense of accomplishment that, when paired with a suitably powerful attack outcome, can make a game feel more visceral than if a powerful attack were launched with a single button press.
In my latest game prototype, I decided to implement a simple Street Fighter-like command input system for executing special attacks. The big trick here is to take a stream of (imperfect) human input, compare it against a list of canonical actions, and match in such a way that a human player will be satisfied that the system is responding accurately to their input. This is how I put it together. Continue reading
As you can probably guess from my post on getting the UDK to launch without cooking, I like writing batch files to make my work more efficient. Since that post, I’ve added a few more UDK command-line arguments to further improve my workflow. I’d like to share those here and help others find their UnrealScript bugs earlier and more easily than before. Continue reading
This comic by the Penny-Arcade / PvP Mega Comic Conglomerate really hit a spot for me: The Trenches – Neologism 
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