Monthly Archives: March 2013

GDC 2013

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It’s that time of the year again, when everyone else is partying and having fun (or maybe not – WTF IGDA?) at GDC in San Francisco. I’ll try to collect any links to lecture materials I come across. If you know of stuff missing here, please tell me about it on Twitter @TheJare. You can also check industry sites like Gamasutra, Polygon or Develop for ongoing coverage, and hopefully a lot of these materials will show up in the GDC Vault soon.

Edit: also check out eXile’s awesome and better organized compilation (focused on programming & rendering).

Constantly updated…

Improv math

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I always loved math and it was one of my favourite subjects during school. I have to thank my dad and my bro for instilling that love in my head. My young self was always baffled by how most people around me not only hated math, but they seemed to have a hard time with it. How could it be hard? It was all logical, you hardly needed to work or memorize anything because, hey, with just a few basics in your head you could deduce any formulas or theorems you needed during an exam, right? Heh.

This year I’m one of the tutors for the Master on Game Programming at the U-Tad. The subject I’m teaching this course is Game Architecture: Game Objects, Main Loop and Timing, Reading & Saving, etc. This is the Master’s debut year, so while I believe the course is going great (and students seem to agree so far), some bits and pieces are not ideal and will need improvement for the following years.

One of them is, unsurprisingly, math.

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Haskell

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Back in my 2nd year in college (1990), I took a half year course on functional programming. Back then, having several years of heavy duty Z80 assembly videogames programming, and being recently introduced to high level languages via Pascal and Modula 2, my brain was very fresh and open to new paradigms and ideas. Structured languages like Pascal and C were a great way to remove some of the tedium and bureaucracy of assembly, but functional was mindblowing. I already understood the idea of passing functions around as parameters, since we did a lot of that in our semi-OOP approach to game character behaviour. But when you create your first infinite list, wow, that’s a moment to remember!

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