When I first started game development, I thought the hardest part was starting it. I was wrong. It’s not thinking of a gameplay logic and acquiring graphics. **It’s actually finishing the game!** _And developing all the little features and details that make the game feel polished_. We’re at step Step 3 of the Flame and Flutter tutorial series and work is just about to begin. In this part, we will be taking steps…
Microsoft’s **Visual Studio Code** has come a long way from being just a source code editor (which it’s defined as). With the plugins and contributions it has become a **full-fledged IDE** supporting multiple workflows and technologies. I’ve been using it recently for all my development projects. Last week, I’ve been notified that there’s an update (February 2019 – `v1.32.1`). VS Code’s updates are automatic so you just restart the IDE and…
In this part of the tutorial series, we will focus on adding graphics and animation. We’ll pick up where we left off in the previous part where we have created an interactive-enough casual mobile game. The game will stay the same in features but with more movement and better graphics. Like the previous parts, there will be a demo video in the end. If you haven’t read the previous part, now is a…
Open-source software is a great concept. It brings out the best in people helping each other build something that can be used by anyone. That’s why it makes me happy when Microsoft announced that the Windows Calculator is now open source. When people ask me to teach them programming. I tell them there’s no such thing. Of course, software development exists. But learning programming “in general” just doesn’t make sense. **You have…
The 2D game development tutorial is at a point where there are only boxes on the screen. In the next part, we’ll be adding some assets. Here’s a Langaw game assets preview. Just a quick post. Basically, the plan is to create five different types of flies. Each with different abilities. The images below show the concept art for the game. They’ve been digitized and ready for the next tutorial which I…
Have you ever wanted to develop video games? You’ve come to the right place. This is an on-going tutorial series on how to create your own 2D casual mobile game. This tutorial is a continuation of the previous part which is an introduction to game development targeted towards developers of any level. In this part, we will aim to write a playable whack-a-mole style game. The game will be called **_Langaw_** (our local word…
Why create a mobile game? Most people would agree that games are fascinating pieces of software. These people, including myself, have played lots of games and discovered a different world or reality in-game. Games can range from having simple and linear gameplay to really complex involving 3D, almost real physics engines, realistic graphics, procedurally generated worlds, and storylines that adapt to the player’s choices. Some people want to take things further and create their…
As bloggers, we all have downtimes. Work, family matters, writer’s block, anything could be the reason. It would really be awesome if there’s was something that updates our blogs for us when we can’t. **Content Recycler** does just that. Well, sort of. This plugin recycles your old posts, so they show up on the blog page as if you just published them. For this reason, I developed a plugin for WordPress that…
Trailing slash on website URLs has a long history of debate whether it is good or bad practice. Should you put trailing slashes on your site’s URLs? Let me say it upfront. I prefer my URLs to be clean and without a slash at the end of it. Trailing slashes just add an unnecessary character to the URL. ## History of URLs URLs (uniform resource locator) which are also URIs (uniform resource identifier) are modern…
I discovered [_Discord_](https://discordapp.com/) and noticed that its servers are great communities (so much better than Slack’s anyway). One of the technologies that I’m good at is WordPress so I joined an unofficial server for WordPress support. In there, I noticed that most of the chatter is some guy asking for help to some trivial (for me at least) problem. It’s really simple. So I decided to make it a…
Just yesterday, my potato of a laptop died on me. Not dead as in dead in the water but soon will surely be. Running more than one app makes the whole system freeze for like 20 minutes. Who could work with that? I was running Lubuntu, supposedly the lightest and fastest in the Ubuntu family or Debian derivatives for that matter. I could still boot it up and access the file manager. So after setting up…
Mental strength is equally as important if not more than physical strength. It sounds like a sentence from any random motivational quote you might encounter on the internet. But I have proven this to be true during the last ride. A little bit of backstory first: About three months ago, I stopped riding my bike on long rides. In fact, it’s safe to say that I actually stopped riding. All the weight I lost…
