I know you guys miss me 🙂
I havent been blogging lately and its entirely because i’m a lazy bum. I think it’s time i start blogging more consistently again. Once a month maybe.
So here’s what you’ve been missing:
Jungle Escape
I made a post with this game a while back. At the time of writing this post, it just passed the half a million downloads mark. I never anticipated that this game would have gotten this popular. It has even gotten me a tv and a few radio interviews. I’d recommend developer out there who has a smart phone to try making a game and publishing it in one of the app stores.
Microsoft Imagine Cup
After years of trying and failing, I finally made it to the finals. It’s mainly because of the team leader, Orane, who’s also another good developer and artist. He even got me to use Unity3D. Even thought we didnt win anything, it was a great learning experience and a sigh of relief from all my previous failed attempts. The game was done in only two weeks prior to its submission by Orane. That’s pretty impressive to me. I’ll be posting screenshots of the game and sharing my experience over the years entering the competition in a future blog post.
DragonScript
I’m no stranger to developing programming languages, but this is my first effort at making one this complex and completely from scratch: i’ve never completed my previous attempts, i’m hand-writing the lexer and parser and I’m making it object-oriented. Whether or not it will be type-safe of not is something I’m constantly changing my mind about. Making it typesafe means I’ll have to do more work while making it typeless, without heavy optimization, means it’ll be slower than I want it to be but will take a lot less time to complete.
I started it in my final year in college. I wanted a scripting language that was precompilable, has c++-like syntax, has a very light memory footprint, is easy to embed, is JIT-able, would allow me to convert it’s source to other languages (as with coffeescript or typescript) an is free to use for commercial purposes. No current library/language I found met all of these requirements, so I decided to make my own language. With it I should be able to make cross-platform games easily. Since it’s written by me, I can add whatever other feature i want and control the direction of the project.
It’s currently being hosted on github. Here’s the link: https://github.com/njbrown/dragonscript
I got some cool stuff I want to show you guys that i did with OpenGL and thanks to emscripten I can show you guys directly in the browser. But that’s for another time.
See ya!
Nick the Coder 