Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Merry Christmas!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 25, 2013

A very Merry Christmas to you and yours.

I hope your day – and the season – is filled with peace and happiness.

And here’s some custom programmer art to spoil it all for you:

Christmas

My wife did a better job with our Christmas Card, taking advantage of a very fun family portrait session we enjoyed this year. Maybe this will make up for the programmer art:

SteampunkChristmas

Whatever the case, whether you observe it or not, have a wonderful day, and have fun!


Filed Under: General - Comments: 10 Comments to Read



  • Cuthalion said,

    Aww… it’s a happy little tree! Merry Christmas, Coyote.

  • Maklak said,

    Hey people, I’m interested in a game, but forgot it’s name. Maybe one of you could direct me to it. It was a citybuilder with sprite isometric graphics. It was developed by (mostly) one guy, I think and I’m not sure if it’s finished or not. It was set somewhere between middle ages and 19th century. Roads were useful and looked gray. You started on the bank of a river and there were forests on the map. You could cut them for wood, but some herbs needed for healing only grew in forests that weren’t cut in decades. I think that you had to build a river port and marketplace, a school and some other special buildings.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Not ringing any bells here (no pun intended). Anyone else have an idea?

  • Maklak said,

    NVM, I found it. It is called Banished http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/

  • Maklak said,

    BTW, I’ve noticed that you almost never write about programming, finding bugs, game architecture (hierarchy of classes / modules as opposed to game design and balance) and similar topics. Do you think, it wouldn’t be interesting?

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Ah, that should probably go into a FAQ. Or a new blog post. 🙂

    Yeah, I don’t – for the reason that I don’t really intend this to be a game development blog, but a blog about (mostly) indie games and all the things it touches on. A lot of readers aren’t into development, and many that are would not find programming articles useful (because they don’t program, don’t use that particular engine, etc.)

    But on the other hand, game design issues are things that most players can understand and have opinions on. We are born hard-wired for fun. Maybe not everybody enjoys exactly the same things, but we don’t have to go to school to learn how to have fun. So that’s an aspect of game development that I think can be fun for both laymen and veteran developers.

    I’ll still occasionally talk more “hard” issues, but there is one more reason: I don’t know that I have much to share of value that hasn’t been covered by a zillion other sites out there. As far as programming is concerned, I am not clever. I am not John Carmack. While once in a while I may find the need to do something that I personally consider kinda cool and clever, 95%+ of the code I write is pretty basic.

    One could even go so far as to say I eschew cleverness in my code, for the simple reason that simple and straightforward is far easier to debug and maintain.

  • Maklak said,

    Well, I still stick around, but I’m not that interested in marketing and similar issues and I consider “The Black Triangle” to be the best blog post around, even though I prefer “get a small piece of it to work, then increment and test iteratively” to the alternative.

    I’ve read somewhere that to debug something, you have to be at least twice as clever as the person who wrote it, so if someone writes as cleverly as possible, then by definition, he isn’t smart enough to debug it.

    I’m less clever then you, so I’ve learned to stick to “kinda stupid, but works” and I can get more done that way. Of course I try not to be too stupid and use reasonably fast algorithms and so on. Time to be smarter comes either when I need to come up with an architecture and interfaces between pieces of code or when I look at what a profiler tells me.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Yeah, I’ll try to provide a cross-section of stuff to appeal to devs and non-devs alike. Maybe even programming articles from time to time. 🙂

  • Cuthalion said,

    I’d be interested in programming articles also, since I prefer not to have to follow tons of people. (In other words, I’m lazy and want it brought to me by people I already consider credible.) But I certainly understand why you don’t do them frequently. Shamus needs to write more of them though, for sure; he’s got a knack for making them accessible.

  • Anon said,

    > I’ve read somewhere that to debug something, you have to be at least twice as clever as the person who wrote it, so if someone writes as cleverly as possible, then by definition, he isn’t smart enough to debug it.

    Or he just needs twice as long… 😉

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