Voyaging Mind

What are blogs for if not for the random mumbling of a confused mind. Yep you are in for one of those posts again. I am actually writing this post in Emacs. Yes I usually use Vim but though a series of events I had the urge to mess with Emacs. I like them both but found Emacs to be RSI inducing and have been settled on vim for some time. However I kind of like how Emacs makes the REPL style of programming so easy where with vim I just can't quite get it set up correctly (on windows), honestly I probably just want to play with Emacs again. So I installed Emacs. The first thing I did was to install Evil. Evil is essentially an clone of vim inside Emacs, ok, it does not quite go that far but you do get all the nice functionality you find in the default vim installation. The joke is Evil finally creates a good text editor for the Emacs operating system. So far I have not put much else onto my Emacs install. I customized Evil a bit to get it closer to my vim set up. I think I wi...

I am part way though a coding up my next article for voyaging mind  but I will admit progress is pretty slow at the moment. This is why has not been many posts here recently. A couple of things are contributing to this. I am training for a half marathon and have been starting to ramp up the miles I run. This has left me pretty knackered out and just wanting to eat and relax. Over the summer I have also flipped to running in the evening. I really enjoy it and at first it did not eat much time. Now that I am heading out for one and a half hour runs it can be quite late before I actually sit down to code. Factor in Taekwondo training two nights a week and suddenly I don't have much time. Summer time is always a strange as the children are at home meaning the things are a whole lot more fluid in what we do. We are much more likely to head out to the beach or take an evening walk somewhere if they don't have to get up for school. We are now heading into autumn so schools ar...

August is usually a bad month for productivity. This August is not exception. I figure to regain my motivation I should write a meandering post that covers some of my thoughts about stuff. This won't go anywhere in particular and most of my views expressed here will have changed by the time I click publish. If I ever do. The real goal is the get my mind back in to tech stuff. I find a good way to do this is to write long winded posts that lack any real meat and don't really inform! This one is slightly different as it contains the advice that writing long blog posts that no one want really wants to read actually benefits you by helping you get back into the flow. If you stop reading now, you could pretend it was a short post with a small take away item to think about! So you didn't stop. I did warn you. I read the whys guide to ruby. Ruby seems pretty nice but really the book was enjoyable mostly because of the guys writing style. Well recommended if you want a tri...

Last night I finished off another article for the voyagingmind.com . I have another one in the pipeline that will complete my mini series on parsing. Once this is done the pace should drop as the pipeline will be empty. In my mind I want to write two types of articles for the site. Long form what I have been up to style articles. So over a period of a month I can collate together the interesting bits of a project I am working and write about the problems that needed to be overcome. I want to focus more on the take away lessons rather than the finite detail. Tutorial style articles. Here I want to avoid writing an article about how such and such technology works, so I won't be writing an introduction to the web audio API, rather I would want to write something the will still be interesting in 10 years time. Of course it is about programming so will require code and I imagine any language I use will look quite different in 10 years, still I want the article to be interesting to...

Ok I have a very early version of voyagingmind.com uploaded. As you can see it is pretty simple and only contains one article at the moment. The tech side is pretty standard. I use wintersmith  as the site generator. There is not particular reason for choosing this static site generator over the many others. It just seemed to gel with my brain a little more than others. I am using disqus for commenting on the articles. Again for no other reason than I had heard of it and I needed comments on what is effectively as static site. I plan to put pretty much every meaningful thing I write or create on it. That means eventually contain some games, maybe some apps and articles on a fairly wide range of topics. Pretty much if it interests me it will eventually appear on the site. So to surmise, mostly for my own clarity. It is not a blog. Articles will tend to be longer form and when discussing development of a project I will focus on the algorithms/problems solved rather than how...

Another aspect to brands that I did not cover in the last post is that if you are a lone developer or small team you can make yourself/company the brand. People will pick up you latest game because it is made by you. This is an indie advantage as it is hard for large companies to retain the personal feel that is needed for this. It seems to work, many indies games developers do it. It does ever so slightly limit the games you can make as it is hard to make something that is distant from your previous game as people that like your brand may not like it, meaning your brand reach will gradually reduce in size or perhaps just alter. Given you are unlikely to succeed in this unless you are making games you love and it shows through via twitter/facebook/plus then the idea of limiting the games you make to the ones that you want to make is on the whole not to bad a deal with the devil :) Honestly if I was trying to build up into a full time indie game developer then this is the route ...

I don't consume much news as most of it equates to noise for the brain. Much is designed to evoke reaction rather than inform or educate. I consume just about enough to not be clueless about events in the world but not too much for it to consume much time. I would rather spend my time in different ways. One piece to tech gaming development news that filtered through to me is the discussion of brands in the mobile market. Brands are important to games companies as they provide a bed rock from which to base your company or pull it out of troubled water if an experimental idea goes wrong. Madden hit 25 years old I think may have triggered some of this discussion. Will people still be playing Angry Birds in 15 years time? How about Candy Crush?  I suspect because of their limited style of play they will follow the path of worms back in the 1990's. They will get follow ups but none will match the success of the original but they will remain profitable for years to come. I a...