Archive

Zero to One Hundred Thousand Tests

When I started at StrongDM five years ago (woah), we had zero automated tests. Last year we had 50,000 tests. Today, around 70% of our code is covered by over 100,000 tests, most of which run on every pull request.

What follows is my personal opinion about what constitutes a “good” automated test based on my observation of this colossal increase in test coverage. The goal is not to convince you I’m right, but to draw some contrasts and provoke you to question assumptions and form your own opinions.

Catch Your Dream

When I was young, my dad had a Power Macintosh 6500 and a copy of a game called MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat. By my estimation, it was not very good. It was slow and boring and I mostly got confused and died.

However.

It had the absolute coolest intro cinematic of all time. It still gives me goosebumps.

After the intro and a minute or two of listening to the 12X CD-ROM drive spin, I had to face the menus. If I was lucky (what’s a “campaign”?), I would eventually blunder my way into the actual game and then the real frustration began. Nuclear submarines have more intuitive controls.

The start of a game development journal

I am starting a journal for my game development work because I spend a lot of development time thinking and staring into space, and those thoughts don’t always make it into the game. I need an outlet to direct those thoughts and hopefully make them more useful. The project I am working on is also personal and necessarily relates to my feelings about life and art and God, and I need a place to write those things down too. I may publish some of these entries on my blog.

The Identity Problem

Disclaimer: views expressed are my own and are not endorsed by my employer.

It’s a famous joke that naming things is one of the hardest problems in computer science. I think this alludes to a fundamental truth behind so many of the problems I encounter every day as a software engineer. Let me ruin the joke and reword it a bit.

The hardest problem in computer science is deciding whether two things are the same thing, or different. I don’t know if there’s already a name for this concept, but I’ll just call it the “identity problem”.

Waiting on Tests

Disclaimer: views expressed are my own and are not endorsed by my employer.

In 2019 we had roughly zero automated tests at StrongDM. We did manual quality assurance testing on every release. Today we have 56,343 tests.

Anecdotally, the rate of bugs and failures has not decreased by a commensurate amount. Instead I think it correlates with focused efforts we’ve made at various times to either ship big new features (resulting in many unforeseen bugs), or stabilize existing features (resulting in fewer bugs).

Making Games

In March 2018, I had been a full-time indie game developer for four years. My heroes were Jonathan Blow, Lucas Pope, and Robyn and Rand Miller. I had 2,500 Twitter followers, an ambitious title under my belt with thousands of sales, and a free office in a hip coworking space near downtown Columbus, generously provided by some friends at a local game studio. I distinctly remember wondering why anyone would want to be something other than an indie game developer. I joked that I had a “disease” that compelled me to make games (my dad once told me that what people joke about speaks volumes). One month later, I was living in Los Angeles, working as a software engineer, and realizing I had just burned out of the game industry.

There and Back Again: GraphQL at strongDM

This post originally appeared on the strongDM engineering blog.

Once upon a time, strongDM had no dedicated frontend engineers. We backend engineers dipped our toes in the React frontend as infrequently as possible. It relied on dusty, bespoke, private REST endpoints that returned schema-less JSON blobs. We let these languish while we built a shiny new public API with code-generated SDKs in five languages. Occasionally I was forced to write a new private endpoint for the frontend. I did so with shame, dreaming of a future when the whole frontend would only talk to the public API. Then one day, we hired a frontend engineer, and everything changed.

How to Exfiltrate Code from Bitbucket

Every year or so, something compels me to start over with a fresh OS image. Most recently, that something was an unfortunate water bottle incident. Once again, I need to pull down my digital life from the internet.

The code and assets for this blog currently live in a 500 MB Git repository, which was hosted on Bitbucket until earlier today. Let's try cloning it!

evantodd@HW-0063 ~ % git clone git@bitbucket.org:etodd/etodd.io.git
Cloning into 'etodd.io'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 2237, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (2237/2237), done.
remote: Compressing objects:  99% (1885/1903)
# hang

No worries, we can clone over HTTPS!

The Poor Man's Netcode

The more you know about a given topic, the more you realize that no one knows anything.

For some reason (why God, why?) my topic of choice is game development. Everyone in that field agrees: don't add networked multiplayer to an existing game, you drunken clown.

Well, I did it anyway because I hate myself. Somehow it turned out great. None of us know anything.

Problem #1: assets

My first question was: how do I tell a client to use such-and-such mesh to render an object? Serialize the whole mesh? Nah, they already have it on disk. Send its filename? Nah, that's inefficient and insecure. Okay, just a string identifier then?

The Poor Man's 3D Camera

Each of us have our own giants to face. This is a story about one of my giants. Something I never imagined could make a grown man cry, until it did.

A 3D camera.

No one can face your giants for you. This is a story, not a walkthrough. Expect no useful information. For that I recommend 50 Game Camera Mistakes by thatgamecompany's John Nesky. His job title is literally "camera designer".

Thirteen Years of Bad Game Code

Alone on a Friday night, in need of some inspiration, you decide to relive some of your past programming conquests.

The old archive hard drive slowly spins up, and the source code of the glory days scrolls by...

Oh no. This is not at all what you expected. Were things really this bad? Why did no one tell you? Why were you like this? Is it even possible to have that many gotos in a single function? You quickly close the project. For a brief second, you consider deleting it and scrubbing the hard drive.

The Poor Man's Voice Acting

Allow me to regale you with an exciting tale: the birth of a janky dialogue and voice system.

I have a JSON file with all the localized strings in my game, like this:

{
	"danger": "Danger",
	"level": "Level %d",
	...
}

A preprocessor takes this and generates a header file with integer constants for each string, like this:

namespace strings
{
	const int danger = 0;
	const int level = 1;
	// ...
}

At runtime, it loads the JSON file and hooks up the integer IDs to localized strings. A function called "_" takes an integer ID and returns the corresponding localized string. I use it like this:

The Poor Man's Threading Architecture

The game industry hit Peak Advice Blog a while ago. Every day I read skim ten articles telling me how to live.

Fear not! I would never give you useful advice. This series is about me writing bad code and you laughing at my pain.

First Contact

Say you have some voxels which occasionally get modified. You regenerate their geometry like so:

voxel.Regenerate();

Because you are a masochist, you want to do this on a separate thread.

Ludum Dare 34 Postmortem

Friday 21:15

Fifteen minutes after the theme announcement, my friend Ben Homan walks through my front door. Not really my front door, I'm just a subletter. But this is a first. Normally he ignores our instructions to walk in without knocking. The first time, he texted me from the driveway.

21:30

Jesse Kooner walks in, also unannounced, bearing frozen pizza. Before he can even kick his shoes off, I loudly explain the theme: a never-before-seen tie between "growing" and "two-button controls".

One Weird Trick to Write Better Code

Developers hate him!

We'll cover some standard tips and tricks here, but we're not really interested in those. We're looking for the One Weird Trick to rule them all. Hopefully each trick we encounter brings us closer to coding Mecca.

In the beginning

The first video game I ever wrote was called Ninja Wars.

Yes, that is an HTML table of images. I changed the src attribute to move stuff around.

The Poor Man's Postmortem - Lemma

The big secret of our industry is, we don't actually enjoy making games. We slave away in obscurity for years in anticipation of one glorious day.

Not release day, no. The day we can finally write a postmortem full of pretentious anecdotes, bad jokes, and unsolicited advice.

Things to do when making a game

Ancient gamedev postmortem traditions mandate that this section be titled "what went right". Unfortunately, the game was so shockingly good and so many things went right that a full overview would stretch on endlessly.

The Poor Man's Character Controller

Let's say that, like so many of us, you want to make a surreal voxel-based first-person parkour game. You're trying to figure out a production schedule. What will take the longest? Graphics? Sound? Level design? I bet it will be the character controller. And I bet it will take 4½ years. Why?

• In running/jumping games, player movement is paramount. It takes forever to nail the right feeling.
• Each game is a unique snowflake. You will not find an article explaining how to design the controls for your specific game. You're flying blind.

That said, each game offers a few transferrable bits of wisdom. Here's my story.

Screenshot Saturday 213

It's the end of February and this game is supposed to be content-complete. In a sense, it actually is. All the levels are done. Twenty in all. I thought this month would never end!

Just so you know, there are sixty of those lights and I had to hook up each one individually. It fell just barely beneath the "worth it to automate" threshold.

Don't look too closely at this next one, it's a bit spoilery.

The Poor Man's Voxel Engine

This is not a tutorial. It's a story. A Voxel Odyssey.

The story starts with 19 year old me in a dorm room next to the Ohio State stadium. I don't have the repo from this stage of development (SVN at the time), but I remember the process clearly.

XNA 4 comes out in September 2010. I immediately dive in. This turns out to be a poor life decision.

Screenshot Saturday 211

Last Saturday we had the Short North gallery hop. Hundreds of people came through our gallery to see art. The guys helped me set up the Oculus and a projector on the wall.

Sometimes I had to go out and pull people in, but most of the time, there was a line. My favorite customer by far was this kid:

He jumped right in and played like a pro. The mother (recording video) was super supportive and excited.

Screenshot Saturday 210

I finished last week's map. It has some spinny things.

Then I made this week's map.

Who knew purple and green could look so... not terrible?

Anyway, this puts me ahead of schedule. There are three levels remaining. My goal is to for the game to be playable from start to finish by the end of February. It's ambitious, but I'm confident I can do it!

Screenshot Saturday 209

This week was crazy productive. I finished last week's level, finished another level, which looks like this:

...which also included some story-related writing and scripting, and actually started working on NEXT week's level, which looks like this:

I seem to be on a purple streak lately. Actually, purple may rise unintentionally to be the most prominent color in the game. Also, this last level is apparently a subconscious ode to Monument Valley.

Screenshot Saturday 208

This week's level is not quite done yet, but I have an excuse! Power was out at the incubator for two days, and the internet didn't come up fully until just yesterday.

Still, the level should be done some time this weekend and is already looking pretty good.

I finalized the promotional graphics and published the game to Steam in "coming soon" mode. I'm incredibly grateful to Sam Gebhardt for contributing his Hollywood artistic talent!

Achilles

This past weekend I participated in the CivicHacks "Game Jam for Good". The goal was to raise awareness of the global water crisis and ultimately promote PackH2O, a Columbus-based startup that designs water backpacks for developing water-stressed regions.

The jam lasted 48 hours. My entry is called "Achilles".

Achilles is a multiplayer text-based simulation. You the player must manage a village in a third-world country experiencing a water crisis. You can play it here (bit.ly/waterjamachilles) assuming I haven't stopped paying for the cloud server.

Screenshot Saturday 207

Records continue to be broken. This week's map was actually done on Wednesday!

Although most of Lemma is a strange hybrid of natural and alien-looking architecture, my design calls for a few "industrial / man-made" themed maps. For story reasons, and also because I just want to parkour through a skyscraper.

So on Monday I asked Twitter this question:

Would people be upset if I do a few levels in the visual style of Mirror's Edge? Would that be tribute or rip-off?

Screenshot Saturday 206

I moved my office into an incubator / art gallery this week.

The move is mostly for my own sanity. Turns out, working alone in your apartment for 9 months isn't the most fun in the world. It's a Herculean effort just to stay motivated. I also lost all semblance of a disciplined sleep schedule.

Productivity has been great since the move, and I'm back on a normal sleep schedule. Having people around is great, even if I mostly tune them out to focus on work (sorry guys).

Screenshot Saturday 205

For the first time in the history of Lemma, I'm actually keeping up with my self-assigned pace of one new level per week.

These past two weeks I made two more frost levels. The plan calls for one more frost level, then it's on to the other two biomes.

Both of these levels have interesting quirks and unique features. They're probably too tough right now, but I'm scheduling plenty of time to playtest and sand down the sharp edges.

Screenshot Saturday 203

Big update this week!

My voxel renderer now has the capability to overlay everything with any texture I want. I'm using it on a new set of interconnected winter levels. This way I don't have to manually come up with a frosty version of each texture.

Without giving away too much, this week I built a new system that has implications for both puzzle solving and movement mechanics.

Screenshot Saturday 202

I've come to several realizations this week.

1. Lemma is going to be good, but not great. I have to accept my limitations and finish the thing to the best of my ability.
2. Lemma is more of an experience than a traditional video game.

With these two ideas in mind, I am focusing the next few months on making Lemma the least frustrating, most enjoyable experience I can.

So I'm trying to come up with puzzles that seem difficult but are actually simple to solve. The wonderful Monument Valley did a great job of this.

New blog, new app, new screenshots

Lots of stuff going on this week.

New dev blog

First off, my website got a much-needed overhaul. The horrible slowness of Wordpress.com was driving me nuts, so I switched to a custom-built site.

I used Jekyll, which is a static site generator. It spits out a bunch of HTML files which you can upload to a server, as opposed to Wordpress, which generates fresh HTML every time someone loads your page.

Advantages:

Screenshot Saturday 199

"Level design for days" has been my motto for several months now, and this week is no different.

Behold, new challenge levels! These are timed, bite-sized maps with simple goals that can be completed in under a minute. They're the kind of things you can create in the level editor and share on Steam.

I need to find a new texture for that garish green material.

Lots of other things are happening, but they're more like a million tiny updates rather than a few conveniently screenshot-worthy ones. So that's it for this week! Thanks for reading.

grepr - 7DFPS 2014

I survived 7DFPS, barely. Here are some fascinating statistics:

• Days to create an FPS: 7
• Hours spent: 93
• Levels built: 5
• Lines of code written: 2313
• Hours to spare before deadline: 2
• Functioning brain cells remaining: approximately 4

I'm happy with the result, though. Jack did a great job on the audio as usual, although at the last minute I had to throw in some clunky placeholder sfxr sounds. Blame me for those! Maybe we'll replace them later.

7dfps work in progress

I'm participating in 7dfps this year, which means I'm making an FPS game in 7 days. Here's what I've got so far:

In Soviet Russia, you are bullet.

In my 7dfps entry, moving and shooting are the same thing.

Here's my favorite form of humor: physics glitches.

Here's me getting killed:

Here's a better shot of the city:

Lots to do still.

Screenshot Saturday 196

This past weekend I exhibited Lemma at the Ohio Game Dev Expo. It was an awesome time. Extra Life raised over $9,000 for charity (yes, it is in fact over 9000).

The Oculus Rift was a huge hit!

I worked on various improvements right up to the expo. First, some new textures for moving platforms and doors:

This is the first texture I've created that has any kind of directional meaning. The reason is that until this week, I had no control over how the textures mapped to the voxels. It was all procedural. So if I put an arrow graphic in a texture, there was no guarantee which way it would face.

Screenshot Saturday 194

Just a quick update this week to confirm that I am in fact alive. The iOS contract game is just about done. I'm pretty happy with it.

Now it's back to work on Lemma:

I'll be running a booth, speaking, and participating in a panel at the Ohio Game Dev Expo next weekend! Come on out and hang with us!

Shaders: How Do They Work?

Yesterday I gave a talk at Dev Workshop Conf introducing the basic concepts of vertex and fragment shaders. Unfortunately I don't have a video, just this one potato picture:

It's probably for the best, because Chrome locked up on me halfway through. The slide deck is pretty cool though. It includes over 20 interactive WebGL samples, complete with source code. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Screenshot Saturday 190

Well friends, Lemma is still on pause while I do some contract work. I also have only a few slides done for my shader presentation next week. This whole month is crazy. But I thought I'd hijack this dev blog to show you the game I'm working on, because it's starting to look kinda cool!

It's a top-down iOS survival shooter designed as a sort of franchise tie-in. The budget is pretty low so most of the assets are pulled from the Unity asset store. I've only done a few models myself, mostly just weapons.

Screenshot Saturday 188

I'm taking September off to work for some clients, so Lemma is temporarily on the back-burner.

HOWEVER. Wednesday night a certain something arrived in the mail.

I immediately tried it out with Half-Life 2 and was shocked at the massive improvement over DK1. I was so impressed that I've spent pretty much every waking minute since then trying to get it working in Lemma.

Current status? It's very, very close. The VR itself is 100% functional now, I just need to make some UI tweaks. The Oculus SDK makes an incredibly difficult thing as simple as it possibly can be. For Unity users it's almost plug and play, but because I'm still stuck in 2008 with XNA I had to rip out the Unity plugin and hook it up on my own (similar to what I did for Wwise). I discovered that it's very easy to get a somewhat passable result that's actually incorrect. You have to learn about crazy things like chromatic aberration and time warping to get the best result.

Screenshot Saturday 185

Hello friends. Yesterday I finished the 5th level! It took much longer than anticipated because it's actually 10 separate maps connected together. It includes some simple but hopefully interesting puzzle mechanics.

It also advances the story through notes and several text conversations scattered throughout.

It's hard to see in screenshots, but I added a subtle cloud shadow effect as well. It doesn't respond to the actual clouds, so in a sense it's slightly faked. Because of that I was able to do the projection easily with a ray-plane intersection rather than a full matrix multiplication. Here's the shader code, edited for clarity:

Screenshot Saturday 184

This week was a lot of level design. I'm working on a group of "fractured" but interconnected worlds that the player has to progress through.

Here's a screenshot:

Here's the thread where I got that rock texture. It's a gold mine with a bunch of totally free diffuse, specular, normal, and even displacement maps.

Unfortunately that's all I have time to talk about today. Thanks for reading!

Screenshot Saturday 183

I hit a milestone today.

Three of the four levels so far in Lemma (Rain, Dawn, and Forest) have undergone at least one massive redesign in their short lifetimes. This week I finally gave the same treatment to the fourth level, Monolith. It is aptly named. Let me try to convey just how monolithic this level is now.

This is a perfect example of my patent-pending Design by Trial and Error™ process.

Screenshot Saturday 182

What's that you say? You didn't even notice the absence of Screenshot Saturday last week? How convenient. Let's pretend it never happened. Or rather, pretend that it did. Whatever.

MGDS was a huge success! There was almost always a line to play the game, and I got a ton of useful feedback. Here are some pictures:

Most of the feedback was related to level design. I came home with a phone full of "todo" items. Here are some screenshots of overhauled or brand new sections that resulted:

New trailer!

Gearing up for Midwest Game Developers Summit this weekend. Tune in next week for my first expo post-mortem.

In the mean time, the old trailer was looking woefully outdated, so here's a brand new one!

Screenshot Saturday 178

Small update. This week was bug fixes and more improvements to the level editor (more on that here).

In other news, we were grateful to get some coverage from Monday Night Indie! Unfortunately the stream highlighted some pretty major issues with the tutorial, so...

Brand new level design!

That's it for this week. Thanks for reading.

Screenshot Saturday 177

Our animator Antonio has been hard at work on new animations. Check it out!

Guys, the level editor is really close to being done. Here's some cool features:

You can link entities together. For example, you can have a door open when the player enters a trigger volume. Or have a light turn on. Or both.

The UI now displays buttons for all available commands at any given moment, and their keyboard shortcuts. Different commands are available depending on what mode you're in, and what entities are selected.

Screenshot Saturday 174

First, a couple project updates. I pre-ordered an Oculus DK2! Come August, Lemma will have Oculus VR support. Huzzah!

I also got a sign for our booth at the Midwest Game Developer summit . Got it from eSigns, whom I highly recommend! Insanely cheap, fast, and high quality.

I am currently scrambling madly to complete a build for the Indie Megabooth submission deadline on Sunday. Stuff that's done:

Screenshot Saturday 173

Last week was a huge update, so this week is a bit smaller.

First, we're hard at work on the animations. Here are some early WIP animations:

There are also a ton of new player sounds to accompany those animations, but those aren't very screenshotable. :)

I also vastly improved the god ray effect from last week, so everything is much smoother. Here's another 4K screenshot of it:

Screenshot Saturday 172

Big update this week!

First, I updated the logo. I rotated the cubes 45 degrees to try and convey a better sense of speed and movement. What do you think?

Next, I added support for 4K screenshots. Now I can hit Alt-S and my renderer resizes all of its buffers to 4096x2304 (biggest 16:9 resolution supported by XNA), renders the scene, saves it to a PNG, then resizes everything back to normal.

The Poor Man's Dialogue Tree

As some of you may know, Lemma has an interactive dialogue system that lets you exchange text messages with an AI character.

I implemented every conversation manually in code (well, scripts) until this week, when I got fed up and decided to automate the process!

Like the last article in this series, my system has all the hallmarks of a Poor Man's solution: developed in-house, tailor-made, simple, and based on free and open source software.

Screenshot Saturday 170

Hello and welcome to another week of Lemma development progress updates!

This time I did a lot more work on the player character. I spent a ton of time in GIMP working on the texture map. I didn't skimp on memory space, it's a full 4096x4096. The GIMP file is over 150MB.

I also split the model into three distinct materials: a shiny one for the chest, neck, and pants, a less shiny one for the hands, and a completely dull one for the hoodie. I stored the mappings for these materials in the texture's alpha channel.

Screenshot Saturday 169

This week I finally implemented SSAO! It's pretty basic, but it works.

Check out the effect source code here.

It's a big deal for me because I tried it once before and it came out like this:

I'm also still working on the player model. I think it's close to being in a usable state. What do you think? Is that a ponytail, or a brain slug?

Screenshot Saturday 168

This week was a ton of performance optimizations and graphics upgrades.

Cascading shadow maps! Basically that means all the shadows are much sharper. It was surprisingly easy to implement and barely impacts performance.

Here's a screenshot showing off the new shadows, plus a new character modeling experiment. Just testing things out for now. What do you think?

Turns out, Blender has something called Rigify that can automatically generate an absolutely kick butt IK rig for your character, complete with blend weights for skinning. It's not perfect, especially when there are separate disconnected pieces (eyeballs, for example), but the few problem areas are easy to correct manually. Here's the character animated with the default calculated weights. I haven't touched them at all yet:

Screenshot Saturday 167

With the Kickstarter finished, it's back to our regularly scheduled programming!

I am in the middle of a major graphics engine upgrade. This whole time I've been using fake HDR. Basically I divide every color by 2 when storing it in a texture, then multiply it by 2 whenever I read it from the texture. It works but you end up with lower color fidelity.

Now everything is done in full 64-bit floating point textures. Here's an exaggerated before/after shot so you can see the difference. Notice the color banding on the left.

Final hours

Here we are folks, counting down the last remaining Kickstarter hours!

I'm happy to announce that regardless of the Kickstarter outcome, production of Lemma will continue.

To be honest, I originally planned to cancel everything if the campaign failed. I figured a failed Kickstarter would be a sign that people aren't interested, and that I should cut my losses (nearly 4 years of work) and move on. But in the past month I realized a few things:

FINAL WEEK!

We are now in the midst of the final week of Kickstarter funding! With the campaign nearing the end, I thought I would give you another development update.

First, I spent a few days completely rewriting every bit of text in the game to support multiple languages. You can now change the language from this nifty selector on the main menu, and the whole game instantly switches:

Now all we have to do is translate ALL the things!

GREENLIT!

From the Kickstarter:

It's not every day you see this email in your inbox.

WE ARE ON STEAM! Thanks everyone for your votes! We were part of a batch of 75 titles, even though we hadn't reached the top 100 yet. Go check out the other games that were greenlit today!

Here are the statistics for anyone interested:

Cheat your way through life

From the Kickstarter: Just an update on development progress for Lemma! Thank you so much everyone for your support. I'm still getting tons of useful feedback from people playing the demo. Levels have been tweaked, bugs have been fixed, writing has been edited, and graphics have been tightened. Expect a new build very soon! Here's some new features to look forward to:

First, a minor technical detail. Saved games do not carry over between builds. If you run a newer build, all your old saves will be lost. It's a major drag for beta testers, which is why I've added a new CHEAT menu to skip parts you've already mastered!

Player model and animations

An update from the Kickstarter:

One concern that pops up a lot on Greenlight is the low quality of the player model and animations in Lemma. The reason it's so bad is that I did all of it myself, and I'm not a character artist. People ask, "but couldn't you just try harder? What's so hard about modeling and animating a character anyway? Also, couldn't you just borrow an existing public domain model?"

Movement in-depth

Update from the Kickstarter: I know it's only been 24 hours since the last update, but Lemma is now over 61% of the way to the top 100 games on Greenlight with well over 4,500 yes votes. Thank you all for being a part of this project!

I realized that the 30 seconds of gameplay from the Kickstarter trailer is not enough to really see what's going on, so here's a more in-depth video explanation of the movement in Lemma. Skip to 2:15 to see an explanation of the magical wall-creating, environment-modifying bits.

Looking forward

From the Kickstarter, a quick status update before I talk more about Lemma:

• At the current rate, we are just minutes away from 4,200 yes votes on Greenlight! 56% of the way to the top 100.
• A big thank you to our new backers! There are now 174 of you lovely people (wow) and we're over 32% funded.
• Rock Paper Shotgun covered Lemma yesterday! And with that headline, we've added Bastion to the incredibly long and disparate list of games it's been compared to.
• Kill Streak Media posted a fairly in-depth interview.
• Death By Beta also ran a nice little article.
• In case you missed Caitlin Clark's comment earlier, Lemma was her top pick for Kickstarter games that are "Worth the Wait", along with several other promising-looking games!
• Another great "let's play" video from YouTuber Shake4ndbake.

Okay, let's talk about future plans!

Greenlight update + streaming tomorrow

Hello!

First: I wanted to thank everyone for the amazing support you've shown so far. We're already over 24% funded, which is more than I was expecting this early, so thank you!

Second: A quick update on the Greenlight campaign. We are 26% of the way to the top 100, with 1,918 "yes" votes! Keep on voting, we'll be on Steam in no time.

Third: If you wanted to see more gameplay from Lemma but didn't have time to check out the demo, several YouTubers have posted "let's play" videos of the demo. Draegast has a good one right here.

Lemma: first-person parkour demo

• Download the demo for Windows
• Back the Kickstarter
• Vote for Lemma on Greenlight
• Follow me on Twitter

After an unexpected 24 hour delay, the demo is finally out, and the Kickstarter is live! I'm running on 3 hours of sleep, but here's some things you might not have seen since the last release:

The bouncy cubes are now more like crumbly cubes. They crumble when you touch them.

Screenshot Saturday 162

The Kickstarter for Lemma launches on Monday! Keep an eye out, and tell your friends!

Prepare yourself for tons of giant GIFs. You can click each one to watch a much faster HTML5 version (can't wait until the internet ecosystem finally lets us embed HTML5 gifs...)

This week I revamped the materials... again. Check it out:

It had some interesting implications for the "snake" enemy:

Screenshot Saturday 161

This week I finished what will probably be the last map in the Kickstarter demo. It teaches the player about the "extended wall-run" ability, demonstrated here:

Normally, you hold Shift to wall-run. Now you can just keep holding Shift after you run out of wall, and you'll keep going.

I also fixed the water bugs from last week, so it looks much better now:

I've been worried that I don't have time in the demo to introduce every idea I have at a reasonable pace, so I'm thinking of including a "sandbox" map that just enables every ability and throws every idea at the player and lets them play around.

Screenshot Saturday 160

This week I finally fixed my water code to allow finite bodies of water like this:

(It's so dark because I still have a pesky rendering bug)

I also realized I accidentally had pre-multiplied alpha turned on for my cloud texture. Here's what it looks like when you use pre-multiplied alpha incorrectly:

And here it is fixed (I also made the clouds fade in over distant objects):

Screenshot Saturday 159

This week I overhauled the menu. It's very Valve-ish now:

I also distributed a number of mysterious notes around the levels to help flesh out the back story. They're actual 3D objects rendered and lit in the game world.

WHAT COULD IT MEAN? THIS REVELATORY NOTE HAS ADDED HEFTY NUANCE TO THE PLOT AND SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED MY IMMERSION IN THE STORY.

Other than that, just lots of level design iteration, scripting, and tweaking.

The Poor Man's Gameplay Analytics

You don't want to take time away from your awesome game to write boring analytics code. So you either call up some friends, hire playtesters, integrate some 3rd party SDK (ugh), or just do without.

WRONG. You roll your own solution. Here's why.

Why you don't do without

The OODA loop models the way human individuals and groups operate. It goes like this:

• Observe the situation
• Orient your observations in the context of goals, past experience, etc.
• Decide what to do
• Act on your decision
• Repeat!

After the initial act of creation, game developers operate under the same principle. You play the game and observe it, orient that data in the context of your goals, decide what to do, open your IDE, and put your plan in action. Rinse and repeat.

All Ahead Full

Progress report. Sir, we have inbound screenshots from the first two weeks of full-time development. Bearing zero nine five, range three hundred. Prepare countermeasures.

I added motion blur around the screen edges when the player is at their maximum speed:

The phone has returned, but now it's in full 3D glory:

Some parts of the levels now build up dynamically when the player reaches them.

Ramping Up

I'm sorry, I've been terrible at keeping everyone up to date with Lemma. If you want to see what I've been up to since Alpha 3, my TIGSource DevLog has a few posts you might have missed. Starting now I'll be focusing more on blogging, so expect more posts in the coming days!

Here are some highlights from the past... gosh. Seven months? Wow.

• Player movement has been drastically improved. No more floaty, slow acceleration.
• New auto-respawn system. No more backtracking 10 minutes to the last checkpoint.
• Full Xbox 360 gamepad support
• Major gameplay overhauls. The pistol and energy pickups are gone.
• Major level design overhauls. All but the first level has been thrown out.
• Four new types of enemies
• New, cleaner textures
• New logo
• New website

This is just the beginning. As the title suggests, I'm getting ready to ramp up development in a big way. As such, I found it necessary to upgrade my workspace. I've been using a standing desk at work, and I love it so much that I decided to build one of my own out of $200 of IKEA parts:

Auto-generating JSON serialization code in Objective C

I wrote this article for the Sidebolt company blog. Reposting it here for your reading pleasure!

Our latest game Skyward Slots makes extensive use of JSON. We send Gigabytes of it flying back and forth haphazardly between client and server over a WebSocket connection. At first, we wrote code by hand to pack and unpack each message. Later on we decided that life is too short for that.

In the beginning, we just dove into the JSON right where we needed it.

Simulating UIScrollView in Cocos2D

I wrote this article for the Sidebolt company blog. Reposting it here for your reading pleasure!

We publish our games on both Mac and iOS. Since UIKit is not available on Mac, we have to build all of our UI by hand in Cocos2D. One of the hardest parts to get right was emulating the UIScrollView bouncy scroll formula. Here it is in action:

There are tons of implementations available in nearly every language and framework, but few of them nail all the important properties of the UIKit scroll:

Lemma - Alpha 3 Ready to Play

• Download for Windows
• Check out the IndieDB project page
• Like on Facebook
• Follow on Twitter

After seven months of hard work, Alpha 3 is ready to play!

Some interesting statistics:

• 28,000+ lines of code
• 29 MB of compressed voxel data
• 63 MB of sounds and music
• 38 animations
• 60+ textures and normal maps
• 220+ revisions since Alpha 1

Incidentally, most of that is open source! If you're a developer, check it out on GitHub.

Quantity Brings Quality

As I suspected, I have an almost insurmountable case of coder's block after a full day at work. Nevertheless, things are getting done. In fact, this might be the best thing that's happened for Lemma because it's forced me to cut a lot out of the design and focus on core things. It's the only way I'll ever finish.

Screenshot below gives an idea of the new direction. I've dropped any pretense that the game occurs in our world as we know it. It was a restriction that existed only to service the story, and it was limiting the gameplay and visual style a lot. Now I'm free to do a lot more, and I'm not precluded from telling a story just because it's fantasy rather than sci-fi.

Anecdotes ahoy

A smorgasbord of anecdotes carefully compiled just for you, dear reader. This is #2 in a series of three posts which were originally one, before I decided I just had too dang much to say.

OpenStack

I spent a few weeks at work building a fully operational death star OpenStack cluster. What does that mean? Basically, we have our own little private version of Amazon Web Services. We can create virtual machines, virtual hard drives, even virtual IP addresses, all with just a few clicks. It also includes an S3-alike called Swift.

My Biggest Fear for the Future of Human-Computer Interfaces

I recently had to install and configure an 18-node OpenStack cluster, a process which involved a lot of SSHing and text-editing in terminals. I thought about learning Vim, but I was afraid of the incredibly steep learning curve, so I made do with GNU nano. It's not at all powerful, but it's easy.

Eventually I realized, "This is my job. This is what I do every day. Why am I holding off on learning something now, thinking it will slow me down, and that I'll have time to learn it later? It's not like I'm anticipating a major career shift any time soon."

Internet is Back

I just got internet back after being without it since before Christmas. It was a tearful reunion, to be sure. Turns out, I was actually more productive than usual without internet. There's a one-word explanation for that, and it rhymes with "edit".

ANYway, here's what got done:

Analytics

When you finish a play session, you'll see something like this:

I haven't figured out the server side of this system yet, but all it really needs to do is accept plain text file uploads. Once I have the files, it's easy to load them into the editor, yielding data like this:

Progress Report

Lemma has been radio silent recently, but that does NOT mean things aren't happening! I've been able to do a ton of work almost every day these past few weeks. Here's what's going on:

1. Did some massive surgery on the very first tutorial section after getting some feedback from a limited alpha release. It introduces, jumping, climbing, vertical wall-running, and rolling/crouching.
2. Added a second, underground section that introduces horizontal wall-running, wall-jumping, and some important story elements.
3. Added a THIRD section, which you will see in a moment, that reviews everything and introduces the flying kick move.
4. Wrote a small chunk of dialog for the text-message system. It's harder than I anticipated, making the conversations truly interactive without having the dialog tree explode exponentially in size.
5. Simplified and consolidated the controls. Everything is on Shift, Spacebar, and Control now, should be very intuitive for FPS players.
6. Overhauled some of the animations and added new ones for some new parkour abilities.
7. Made the menu a lot more user-friendly.
8. Committed approximately 15 million bug-fixes and tweaks.

TL;DR: Things are happening. Here's a video that shows one of several ways to get through the third tutorial section in quick fashion.

Mac and Linux Support

How's everyone doing? I'm doing okay. It's a Monday. Hope you're doing okay too. Surviving Sandy aftermath, school, work, and whatever other forms of oppression you may be under.

I don't have anything pretty to show for the past... wow, it's been three weeks. I've been working on a very lofty addition to Lemma's feature bullet list. And that is Mac and Linux support, via the awesome MonoGame project.

Don't get too excited. There is a ton of work left to do before this becomes a reality. But after a few weeks' work, I do know a few things:

Voxel Levitation and Rain

I present to you, "Voxel Levitation: a Step-by-Step Guide".

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4:

Also, check it out. Hurricane Sandy has spilled over into Lemma. It's raining!

That is all.

Allocating large arrays in .NET

I experienced a strange memory issue with Lemma this week. Memory usage skyrocketed each time I loaded a level; it never dropped back down.

Now granted, I am definitely the garbage collector's worst nightmare. (I'll just say this: closures. Closures everywhere.) But at this point I am setting fields to null all over the place and manually calling GC.Collect() after unloading a level, all to no avail.

Enter the .NET Large Object Heap. See, the .NET garbage collector actually compacts the regular .NET heap by relocating small objects to fill the fragments. For exceptionally large objects, it's simply too expensive to relocate them, so the runtime allocates them on the Large Object Heap, which is not compacted.

Slowmo! Stamina! Sprint! Socialism! What?

Stamina and Sprint

I finally realized that speed is perhaps the most important resource in a Parkour game. Up until now, Lemma hasn't really understood the concept of "faster" and "slower"; you were always going the same speed. Acceleration from a dead stop was almost instantaneous and the Parkour moves didn't change your speed (with the exception of wall-running).

With this in mind, I decreased the acceleration a lot and made all the moves preserve your momentum. To make a longer jump, you'll need a running start. I also put in some simple combos. For example, doing a roll immediately followed by a jump lets you jump a lot farther.

Scary Monsters and Nice Clouds

Nice Clouds

I got sick of my old pixelated skybox powered by Google Images and decided to make a real one. I used Spacescape to generate a sufficiently trippy outer space skybox, chopped up some cloud photos in Gimp, fought with my code for a couple hours, and wha-la:

Scary Monsters

What's that glowy green thing you say? It's the new monster I just added, creatively named "the vine". See that string of dark blocks coming out of it? It snakes its way to you and basically tries to constrict you to death. Here's another screenshot of its handiwork after running for a minute or two.

Now with 100% more frame buffer distortion!

Flying in the face of midterms and other IRL issues, Lemma boldly marches on!

Spawn Point Graphics

I realized you need a way to know where you'll respawn if you die, so I added some spawn point graphics. Got the idea from Borderlands. Actually can we talk about Borderlands? Man, every time I play a good game I have to resist the urge to start incorporating its ideas into my projects. If I ever announce that Lemma will feature randomly generated weapons, just slap me until I snap out of it please.

Story Design and Loading/Saving

I now have the complete backstory and in-game story options written out!

After the initial tutorial, you'll get to a central area of the island which connects to four other areas. At that point, you'll be able to leave the island whenever you want, or you can visit one or more of the four adjacent areas before leaving. In each area you'll have to make a yes/no decision. You'll get a different ending depending on which decisions you make and at what point you exit the island. Your choices also affect how many parkour abilities you unlock. There are 5 major possible outcomes, and each outcome has a number of variations, for a total of 15.

Lemma Release 2

Here's an extremely cut-down demo! No tutorial, no story, no explanation, just showing off new moves, new enemies, and the new weapon.

Download it here for free. Please let me know what you think!

Super-Awesome Change List

• Totally new block dissolve effects and sounds. Preeeettty
• A new move that builds a platform of blocks and jumps you to the end of it.
• The kick is gone; instead you can now roll at any time, which not only prevents you from receiving fall damage, but also blasts through any breakable blocks in front of you and if you're in mid-air, tries to build a platform beneath you.
• New aiming system that lets you know if you're able to jump to the target or not.
• A new type of exploding block.
• A "tower" enemy that falls on you if you get too close.
• Brand-new pistol, complete with reload animation, iron sight functionality, and magazine pick-ups.
• When you die, you now drop the pistol and phone, so you have to go pick them up again.
• You can now change the mouse sensitivity and key bindings.
• The MSI installer was replaced by a simple Zip archive with a separate executable that makes sure everything is installed. Now it will be easier for me to push out more frequent updates.
• More tweaks than I have time to list, including animation improvements, lots of new and improved sounds, performance optimizations, and bug fixes.

Stuff To Look Forward To

Brace yourselves

Everyone pretend this blog didn't die for six months, okay? Okay. Here's a brain-dump of random things I've learned while not blogging.

• Distributed programming is tough but really, really fun.
• gevent, Couchbase, Fabric, and pyzmq are awesome.
• Django's admin interface can be twisted fairly easily into a CMS for a dynamic website.
• Bed bugs + week-long power outage + another week with still-broken A/C = fun summer.
• Leaky washing machine + computer in basement directly beneath = new computer.
• A bike is the best thing ever when you're in college.
• Spotify is the best thing ever regardless of time or space.
• Batman was eh.
• Bourne was great.
• Game of Thrones, holy crap! Both the books and TV show. Amazing.
• Buy a Mosin-Nagant. Best $100 you'll ever spend.
• Girls, how do they work?
• Writing HTML5 games is a thing which I can do.
• Don't submit your cover design contest entry a month early, they might totally forget you.
• Tribes is fun and free.
• Battlefield 3 added Counterstrike's gun-game mode. Best ever.
• In December, Lord willing I'll be graduated, living in a new apartment, working full-time for an iPhone game studio. Holy crap.

Life's been busy, but this last semester is pretty easy, so I've had lots of time to work on Lemma. No time to talk about it now, but keep an eye out for a juicy trailer / alpha download soon. For now, I'll just tease you with this!

Finals week

Sorry, no news to report on Lemma this week. School is keeping me busy. But I thought I'd share some of the projects I'm working on for school, since they're kind of cool and actually somewhat related to Lemma. First up: a 3D rapid prototype of the original toon-style Parkour Ninja!

Here's the model rendered in Cinema 4D:

And here it is printed out in 3D:

Alpha feedback

Thanks so much to everyone who made the alpha a great success! I'm blown away that people were able to look past the bugs and crashes and clunky controls and somehow get a positive experience out of it! It gives me hope and motivation to press on.

I got a ton of very useful feedback. Here's a quick summary of what I learned:

• The atmosphere and tone is cool and unique.
• The text-message-driven story works pretty well.
• Everyone immediately says "Mirror's Edge + Minecraft"... but then realize they're okay with that! :)
• The physics is kinda buggy.
• Mouse inversion, gamma settings, and vsync toggling are a must.
• The controls are unnecessarily complex. Too many keys.
• Buggy physics. Player gets stuck in the environment a lot. Large objects occasionally start floating around on their own. Swimming doesn't really work at all.
• Combat is weak. You left-click once and hope that kills the enemy before it kills you.
• It's rather disconcerting being able to look down your own nose. Also, everyone thinks the player model is a female when in fact it's a male with big pecs. Yikes.
• Oh yes, there's lots of physics bugs.
• The tutorials are sometimes easy to miss, and the game expects you to have a move fully mastered immediately after learning it.
• Handling publicity and responding to feedback is a lot more work than I originally thought! And hosting large downloads on "pay for what you use" web hosts is a baaad idea. Good problems to have though. :)

I've already set to work fixing a lot of these issues, especially with the controls and physics. My number one priority is getting the player animation and movement perfect, which is a pretty long way from where we are now.

Lemma Release 1!

It's finally here! Alright I'm just going to dump everything here. Prepare for face melting.

Windows MSI Installer (60 MB)

Note: You might get a malicious file warning. It's because I can't afford a code signing signature at the moment, so the installer has not been signed.

If you're NOT reading this on the shiny new website, did you know that you COULD BE? It's right here: lemmagame.com

Please play the alpha and leave your comments! Your feedback is greatly appreciated!

Help me pick a logo!

I'm going to try and post smaller, more frequent articles. This whole "two months between massive walls of text and screenshots" thing is not working out.

So, the alpha I promised is *still* inbound. I'm working as fast as I can! And I think it's paying off. For a while I was very worried about performance. In my last post I talked about how I optimized the renderer, but there were still issues with the physics engine. I was putting each cube into the physics space as a separate entity, which was making it absolutely crawl, even on my eight core i7.

Global Game Jam 2012 Liveblog

Update: Snakes in a Tower is complete! Downloads with source available for Mac and PC.

Friday 4:59pm

This is my first Global Game Jam. Super excited. So I'm going to liveblog it. I'll be working on a MacBook, so I decided to port the essentials of my XNA component entity system over to MonoGame. Here's what I got so far!

Breathtaking, I know.

Saturday 12:20am

Opening meeting was awesome. Heard some fantastic keynotes from fantastic people. We got to hear some great insight from Ian Schreiber before starting (I'm at the Ohio State jam). The theme has been given to everyone by now, so I'll go ahead and say that the theme is this:

Quick update - Alpha inbound soon!

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            outputFunctions.push(function() { alert(x); });
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