These articles are updates from my personal projects where status is shared and recent challenges/solutions in programming are addressed.
(You can check out the prior week of RPG development here) Well, so far not so great for getting weekly posts on RPG development! It's probably better for me to aim to do these periodically and summarize the last week or so of work. Fewer commitments that way and it's a bit more realistic for me to achieve. With that said, let's dive into it! Entity Filtering in an RPG Our RPG has had some notion of entity filtering for a long time, but to understand the current state of filtering, it's important to understand the two major sets of entities and components we have: Game Objects + Behaviors: Everything in our RPG game world is represented as a "game object" and the properties/capabilities are captured by components called "behaviors" Definitions + Generator Components: The content for our game is…
As I've been trying to get more YouTube content put together more steadily, one of the themes I'm interested in is doing some behind-the-scenes of the role playing game (RPG) I'm making with some friends in Unity3D. I've found that being able to work on an RPG outside of my regular day job is a really awesome way for me to keep up on my technical skills. I love coding, and the further along I move in my career as an engineering manager, the less time I actually spend writing code myself. I pride myself in being a technical engineering manager, so for me working on this RPG is a great outlet for creativity and practice. I mentioned this in my LinkedIn post here: Persisting Game Objects Across Maps In this video, I focus on one of the challenges the…
Modern role playing games (RPGs) can have incredibly complex loot systems. This article introduced a video stream on how to structure cross domain information.
Check out the second entry in the RPG progress pulse where I discuss the progress on my role-playing game, Macerus! This is a hobby project in Unity3D.
An progress pulse update into the development of Macerus RPG and ProjectXyz game framework leveraging Unity3D. Part 1 of the progress pulse series.
Check out the progress on my Unity3D RPG built using C# and dotnet technologies! This is a labor of love and an ongoing project of mine.
Who Needs A Team?! I've been building RPG backends for as long as I've been able to code. I think my first one that I made for my grade 11 class is the only RPG that I "finished"... It was text-based and all you could do was fight AI via clicking attack, buy better weapons, level up, and repeat. It was also 10000 lines of VB6 code and so brutal that I couldn't add anything to it without copying hundreds of lines of code. Since then, I've had the itch. I keep rewriting this thing. I keep taking "Text RPG" (super cool and catchy, I know) and rewriting it. I had my first visual representation of this game called Macerus (here's another rewrite for unity), which is actually how I landed my first co-op job. But every time I'd get…
Delta State Algorithm Motivation This post will act as the table of contents for an algorithm I'm developing for calculating deltas between state for generic sets of data. I figured this would be an interesting series to write about so I can document my thought process, trials, errors, and successes. At the end of this I plan to share working code that implements this algorithm so that you can use it in your own work. Now that I've been not diving more into Unity3D development for my hobby programming, I'm getting to a point in game development where I need to manage state for data in a way that allows patches of state to be applied in a layered fashion. A couple of examples of this include: Applying save game state to a base game state Applying a patch to…
Enforcing Interfaces This is my second installment of the series related to my small side project that I started. I mentioned in the first post that one of the things I wanted to try out with this project is coding by interfaces. There's an article over at CodeProject that I once read (I'm struggling to dig it up now, arrrrrghh) that really gave me a different perspective about using interfaces when I program. Ever since then I've been a changed man. Seriously. The main message behind the article was along the lines of: Have your classes implement your interface, and to be certain nobody is going to come by and muck around with your class's API, make sure they can't knowingly make an instance of the class. One of the easiest ways to do this (and bear with me here, I'm…
ProjectXyz Alright, I'll admit it... Even for a placeholder name on a side project it's pretty terrible, right? Well, my apologies. So, if you made it to this post you might be wondering what ProjectXyz is and why I started it up. From a high level, I started working on ProjectXyz so that I could have a hobby programming project to tinker with and I figured I'd blog about my adventures in bringing it all together. I plan on making this a mini-series documenting some of the things I'm learning or experimenting with, so this will serve as the intro to the series. Before we get too far, here's the link to the GitHub site: https://github.com/ncosentino/ProjectXyz Why Have a Side Project? Here's the main thing I want to talk about in part 1 of this series: Why should you have a…
