Voyaging Mind

So I called practice game 2 finished. This was the space invader clone I was working on. I say called as it wasn't really finished. I had a few game enhancements to do and a reasonable amount of polish to add. I hadn't added support for game controllers, sound effects,  or building for the web. I did add an entity system, bitmap graphics, animations and improved the event system. Build times where pretty quick full rebuild less than a second. The need for graphics meant learning a little aseprite along with writing a script for packing together the results onto a sprite sheet. The animations where described in a text file. I would like to put all game constants in a text file and have them updated whenever the file is saved. There is a ton of other little improvements to be  had. While I could have hacked together a space invader clone very quickly, the goal of practice it to learn and improve. Hence some experimentation and trying to do things in a way  that could be r

Practice game number two is going to be a space invaders clone. Again it is something I could produce in a short period of time as it is a well know problem. I am not taking this route as I want to experiment with ideas and add a little bit to the game "library" that is very slowly amassing. Library has quotes around it as the library and game code live in the same directory. They only differ inside my brain... I spent some time working on a entity component system. Yes an over kill for space invaders but I wanted to get back into the mindset of using one. |It was kind of fun coding that up. Having finally reached the point of needing some graphics I did a tour of applications that could create pixel art. Initially I though I could use Krita but it doesn't allow cut and pasting into the same layer. I want a cut and paste workflow for my 8 by 8  pixel art.  Krita is not really designed for this. Then I thought gimp but I didn't enjoy the UI. Some more searchi

I am gradually reading "The Linux command line" by William Shotts. He has been kind enough to provide it as a free download from his site. It is also available from No Starch Press should you want a dead tree copy. Google is your friend for links :) I have been reading the free online version so am not sure on the differences. It is one of those areas that I have been guilty of never spending the time to learn, I would occasionally learn via osmosis to solve a particular task. So felt I had a reasonable grasp of bash. But there are a lot of holes in my knowledge and this book is gradually filling them. It is a good read and free, if you touch bash you should probably read it, that is unless you are an expert. Reading this book is motivated by wanting to create a comfortable and efficient environment to code in at home. The requirements for work and home are different. I am much more likely to change languages at home and I have much more control over what get aut