About

I'm a software engineer who works on game development part time. I teach game development (on gamedev.stackexchange.com and lynda.com). I'm always working on something, and I'll post updates here. Let me know if there's a game development topic you want to know more about, I probably know the answer, or at least where to get one.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Hand down, productivity down


Unfortunately, it’s been an unproductive week. Here’s the reason:

That’s my bicycle. It’s how I ride (rode) to work 5 days a week, 8 miles a day. Last Thursday evening on my way home from work, an on-coming car turned left directly in front of me. That caused me to hit them and break my bike in two. I didn’t get away unharmed either, the doctors say I have a fractured left wrist. I’ve been in a splint for a week and today got upgraded to a cast. The splint was super restrictive and limited my typing to right hand only. Luckily the cast starts just below the knuckles of my fingers, I can type again! More good news came when I learned that the other insurance company was accepting full liability (rightfully so). That means the replacement bike will be paid for, sweet.

I was able to do a little one handed programming however and I got some things done before the accident. World maps are now tied into the “colony” play areas, meaning I can generate new colonies and load existing ones from the world map. I’ve also started working on expanding the unit AI processor. Finally updated the control flow for adding and removing cubes. They complement each other a lot better now. Adding cubes also show up as cubes that can be interacted with as well, this makes it a lot easier to create more complex structures in the planning phase. It’s something I’ll have to demo in the next video to get full appreciation.