Bits and pieces

I actually haven’t done too much rendering work in the last six to eight months.  I’ve been doing a lot of game prototyping.  Two prototypes have been put to the side for now and I’m working on a third with a couple of folks.  I’m just going to dump out some random snippets I’ve learned through that process.

• Sound is a very important cue for debugging!  While working on a kart racing prototype I was able to feel the kart slide much easier when hearing it then when looking at the visual debugging cues we had set up.  Another spot where sound made it easier to debug behavior is state changes.  If you’ve got some bug where state changes happen really fast, they may not make the player respond visually.  But if it’s triggering snippets of sound on state change you’ll know something wacky is going on.
• Update order matters.  This is something I knew about before, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat it.  In this situation I had a bunch of force constraints that where always updated from one side to the next, eventually the system developed a “lean” and I couldn’t figure out why for a while.  I changed it so that it updated one corner, then the opposite corner and so on and the lean disappeared.
• More to come once I remember them. ;)
• I’m also thinking about submitting a talk for GDC10.  It should be a fun topic to flesh out, I hope it all works out.

I finally broke a million in Robotron!