Thoughts by Sarge

There’s a silly saying that we use in the IndieZen community. When you’re trying to swim with a bag of hammers, it’s called a “floating point error”.

(ba dum bum)… and the crowd groans….

Ok, a slightly less corny saying that you’ve probably heard: “When the only tool you use is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

This saying holds true of many developers, experienced and newbies alike. Typically a developer will learn one or more languages and eventually settle on their preferred language / platform as their “hammer”. Continue Reading »

I remember my first web application. It was late 1996 / early 1997 using IIS 3.0 from my MSN subscription CD’s.

I was using a home grown b-tree system for a database and I needed to expose the data to a web application. My solution was to write COM wrappers for my domain specific data objects and use ASP 1.0 + VBScript for the web application. I was thrilled that I could use COM and IDispatch to hook all of my C++ code to VBScript and use that not only for developing web applications, but also for hooking it up to VBA within Microsoft Office applications.

I really liked the solution. Using VBA, we could do mail merges, export data to spreadsheets, etc.

Except two things… I really hated HTML, and the cross browser compatibility (or rather, incompatibility) caused a hellish nightmare. I know “hate” is a strong word, but it doesn’t even come close to describing my antipathy for web development.

My first web app was my last web app for 13 years. Anytime someone would even mention “thin client” in a design discussion, I’d cringe in disgust… if someone mentioned it seriously, I’d figure out a way to stay out of the client side development, or I’d update my resume and start looking for a new job.

I really despised HTML web app hell… but time marches on, and so do technologies.

Recently, a few things have changed, and I’m actually starting to reconsider my views on web apps.

Continue Reading »

One of the most common sources of confusion I find when I discuss software development occurs when the topic is related to frameworks.

Specifically, what is a game engine framework versus a game engine?

The short answer: A framework provides the abstract interfaces that define components that are used in a game engine and a lot of the “glue” and utility implementation, whereas a game engine provides all of the implementation.

That answer is a bit of a mouthful, so lets break it down…. Continue Reading »

This is a question that comes up quite often, and I have never heard an answer that I completely agree with.

The biggest mistake made when labeling someone has an Indie is to assume that Indies are all hobbyists and amateurs, yet this is completely inaccurate.

Take companies like Sickhead Games, Wadjet Eye Games, Hi-Rez Studios, and Max Gaming Technologies for example.   These are small, independent game development companies.  They’re not hobbyists and they’re definitely not amateurs.

Yet not all Indies are professionals.  Some companies, groups, and individuals that are Indies are comprised of mostly amateurs and hobbyists.

Take companies such as Arcanoria, IndieZen, and RenWerX.  These are mostly comprised of amateur game developers.  But this doesn’t make them any less talented, skilled or experienced as the aforementioned professionals.  Take the IndieZen group for example.  The software developers working on the IndieZen projects are extremely talented programmers with 10 – 30 years of experience.  In my book, that definitely does not make them amateurs.

But even if they were amateurs, that doesn’t make them any more or less Indie.

Am I making my point here?

Probably not… so let me try a different approach by defining a few terms.

Continue Reading »