David Stark / Zarkonnen

Spurred on by this post, here is an in-depth post on memory management in Airships.

I confess that despite my mixed feelings, I've been playing Civ V again, and having more thoughts on how to improve it. In Civ games, you can build World Wonders, very expensive buildings with massive benefits that can only be built once. This generally leads to a race to build wonders, which is a fun mechanic. What's less fun or well-defined is what happens if you lose the race.

Want to try out game development? Have you tried out half a dozen tools and frameworks and engines, only to be overwhelmed each time?

I am going to strip it down: All you need is a main game loop.

I'm excited to announce that Curtis Schweitzer has agreed to create the music for Airships. You may know Curtis from his work for Starbound. To get a taste of what's to come, head over to his SoundCloud profile and have a listen.

I don't consider myself particularly gifted as an artist - drawing a straight line or getting proportions right are beyond me. So I take a very methodical approach with lots of layers to making pixel art. Here, in eight steps, is how I made the logo for Airships.

Following a discussion playing Labyrinth Lord a while ago, here's a quick proposed "Axolotl man" class:

It's been a little over a week since the first early access release, so here's an interim report.

Today marks the release of the second early access version of Airships. I've been working flat out to improve the game over the last week, and there's some cool new stuff:

I am pleased to announce that the early access version of Airships is now available.

In Airships, each player can register a coat of arms, which is used on their ships in multiplayer fights, and in the forum. No two players can have the exact same coat of arms.

Each coat of arms has a heraldic symbol, such as a lion or a wrench. For an extra $20, I'll design you a custom symbol for your individual use.

In the Grim Meathook Future, the urban area around the Tower has been submerged. Outside, there are rooftop slums and barges, inside thrives a shadowy economy of drug dealers, hackers and plutocrats.

If you've been following my Twitter, you may have seen a series of increasingly exasperated tweets about my computer. Basically, for work reasons, I had to upgrade my Mac to Mavericks, the newest OS X version. Unfortunately, Mavericks causes my machine to freeze irretrievably after a few days, and only a complete reinstall temporarily fixes the problem.

It's just occurred to me that to reduce some of the potential issues with the Badness score, the algorithm could take into account how far apart in time connections are.

On the advice of Twitter, I have finally bought and played Don't Starve. I like it a lot. Here's how it fits into my earlier thoughts about survival games:

I've been participating in an increasing number of game jams, currently the Cyberpunk Jam, and am really enjoying myself. Restrictions breed creativity: being restricted in topic and time lets me try out different things. And the limited nature of game jams makes them a nice way of doing something a bit different before returning to the project at hand.

So here's a quick idea for a game jam format that popped into my head the other day.

Once you have survived in a survival game, what do you do? You have found or made clothing, shelter, a steady source of food, means to defend yourself and heal yourself. You have mapped the dangers of your environment and can defeat or avoid enemies. What comes next?

There are two major rules of optimization: first, only optimize when you have to. And second, measure before optimizing. If you try to be clever and write fast code before you know which code is actually causing performance issues, you are liable to spend a lot of time optimizing code that is not the bottleneck.