The BrainDump

  • Creating an animated short… how hard can it be?

    Creating an animated short… how hard can it be?

    Part of the appeal of writing games, apart from the joy of just noodling around with code, is to tell stories. I’ve always had an interest in storytelling and how to present ideas. I’ve considered short story writing in the past, and it’s something that I might attempt properly at some point. But ultimately I’m…

  • Using the Free Pascal IDE for a week

    Using the Free Pascal IDE for a week

    Code can really be written with any text editor that you’re comfortable with. I tend to use Vim for quick edits and writing notes, and on Linux I occasionally use Geany or Mousepad. But when you want to do more than quickly update a few files, you need a full Integrated Development Environment (IDE).An IDE…

  • Pathfinding with smell maps

     Enemies in Axes, Armour & Ale find the player using various methods, from calculating a Bresenham line to the player, heading towards the players last seen location, or even just wandering aimlessly around the map. One of the methods used is a smell, or distance, map. This is much easier to implement than A* star…

  • My current development IDE

    My current development IDE

    I’ve recently reconfigured an old Dell laptop for development work and thought that I’d post my current setup. I love reading about how other people configure their systems and I’m always open to suggestions. I already have a Windows 10 PC, that I only really use to test Windows versions of software that I’ve compiled,…

  • Roguelikes, a very strange hobby

    Roguelikes, a very strange hobby

    Disclaimer. This post assumes some familiarity with the idea of roguelike games, if not with the games themselves. This isn’t a ‘history of roguelikes’ post, for that see here Recently I was working on a graphical roguelike that I occasionally dust off and tinker with, Axes, Armour & Ale. It uses graphics in a very…

  • It’s all about the people

    It’s all about the people

    Back in the day, when I thought that I was going to change the world from behind a keyboard, I wrote a password manager application.  It was a small, portable application that ran in both Windows and Linux, without needing to be installed. The idea was that you could keep your passwords with you on…