I am starting a journal for my game development work because I spend a lot of development time thinking and staring into space, and those thoughts don’t always make it into the game. I need an outlet to direct those thoughts and hopefully make them more useful. The project I am working on is also personal and necessarily relates to my feelings about life and art and God, and I need a place to write those things down too ..read more

Disclaimer: views expressed are my own and are not endorsed by my employer. It’s a famous joke that naming things is one of the hardest problems in computer science. I think this alludes to a fundamental truth behind so many of the problems I encounter every day as a software engineer. Let me ruin the joke and reword it a bit. The hardest problem in computer science is deciding whether two things are the same thing, or different ..read more

Disclaimer: views expressed are my own and are not endorsed by my employer. In 2019 we had roughly zero automated tests at StrongDM. We did manual quality assurance testing on every release. Today we have 56,343 tests. Anecdotally, the rate of bugs and failures has not decreased by a commensurate amount. Instead I think it correlates with focused efforts we’ve made at various times to either ship big new features (resulting in many unforeseen bugs), or stabilize existing features (resulting in fewer bugs ..read more

In March 2018, I had been a full-time indie game developer for four years. My heroes were Jonathan Blow, Lucas Pope, and Robyn and Rand Miller. I had 2,500 Twitter followers, an ambitious title under my belt with thousands of sales, and a free office in a hip coworking space near downtown Columbus, generously provided by some friends at a local game studio. I distinctly remember wondering why anyone would want to be something other than an indie game developer ..read more

This post originally appeared on the strongDM engineering blog. Once upon a time, strongDM had no dedicated frontend engineers. We backend engineers dipped our toes in the React frontend as infrequently as possible. It relied on dusty, bespoke, private REST endpoints that returned schema-less JSON blobs. We let these languish while we built a shiny new public API with code-generated SDKs in five languages. Occasionally I was forced to write a new private endpoint for the frontend ..read more

Every year or so, something compels me to start over with a fresh OS image. Most recently, that something was an unfortunate water bottle incident. Once again, I need to pull down my digital life from the internet. The code and assets for this blog currently live in a 500 MB Git repository, which was hosted on Bitbucket until earlier today. Let's try cloning it! evantodd@HW-0063 ~ % git clone git@bitbucket ..read more

The more you know about a given topic, the more you realize that no one knows anything. For some reason (why God, why?) my topic of choice is game development. Everyone in that field agrees: don't add networked multiplayer to an existing game, you drunken clown. Well, I did it anyway because I hate myself. Somehow it turned out great. None of us know anything. Problem #1: assets My first question was: how do I tell a client to use such-and-such mesh to render an object ..read more

Each of us have our own giants to face. This is a story about one of my giants. Something I never imagined could make a grown man cry, until it did. A 3D camera. No one can face your giants for you. This is a story, not a walkthrough. Expect no useful information. For that I recommend 50 Game Camera Mistakes by thatgamecompany's John Nesky. His job title is literally ..read more

Alone on a Friday night, in need of some inspiration, you decide to relive some of your past programming conquests. The old archive hard drive slowly spins up, and the source code of the glory days scrolls by... Oh no. This is not at all what you expected. Were things really this bad? Why did no one tell you? Why were you like this? Is it even possible to have that many gotos in a single function ..read more

Allow me to regale you with an exciting tale: the birth of a janky dialogue and voice system. I have a JSON file with all the localized strings in my game, like this: { "danger": "Danger", "level": "Level %d", ... } A preprocessor takes this and generates a header file with integer constants for each string, like this: namespace strings { const int danger = 0; const int level = 1 ..read more