So, what did I do? That is, apart from attending music festivals and taking final exams. In other words
What did I not blog about?
First of all, random number generation. When I got Final Fantasy XIII for Steam in November, I flipped through its library licenses and found the Mersenne Twister. It just so happens that I wrote a paper on why it's not as good as people think it is a couple months prior and decided to blog about it. I was mostly quoting other papers though, and didn't feel like I was adding anything of value, so I didn't post.Only days later, I came across PCG on reddit, and decided to port it to .NET, since System.Random is broken. I planned to make that an open source effort and blog about it, but I lost interest halfway through. A week or two ago, I noticed that MonoGame was also seeking to implement its own random number generator for consistency between Mono and .NET, and contributed some of the code I wrote for my own port.
The other thing I wanted to write about is input handling. About two months ago, a friend approached me about making a game in python. We spent a weekend discussing and prototyping the game we would want to make, despite me not knowing any python. While she left for a week long vacation with her family, I decided to implement (and blog about) an input handling system, both to learn the language and to never have to deal with pygame's event system ever again.
However, my friend decided to silently drop the project without telling me for another week after her vacation. This left me too frustrated to continue work on my own, so that never amounted to anything.
So, now what?
Now that I'm committed to MonoGame, I really want to build a game with it, which is what I'll be blogging about in the upcoming weeks. I've been reading Game Engine Architecture by Naughty Dog's Jason Gregory, and started watching Jon Blow talk about programming languages, as well as Handmade Hero, so expect even more low level influences than before.I did decide to wait for a stable release of Jai (and the completion of this project) before switching to native code, so we'll continue using C#. I'll also spend the next week or two preparing for this new series, setting up git for my personal use, coding a bit and writing at least three articles in advance, so I won't have to constantly go back on my promises of what I'll be doing next, and from there, try to post at least once a week.
This project is taking precedence over another project I have planned, which involves Electron, mainly because I don't know any javascript whatsoever and hit a brick wall with that really fast.
Depending on whether I can get any good at JS while also working on a game, that will still come at some point. Otherwise, I'll maybe tinker with the Authoring Tools Framework or look at some other frameworks. Until then, the focus of this blog will remain on game dev and game dev only.
