I believe the key to optimising any program is measurement: not writing l33t code which seems to be what a lot of programmers think optimisation is! The optimisation process is all about finding the slow parts of your program and speeding those slow parts up by refactoring your source code to meet your target performance [...]
There are many different programing languages in existence today (I’m going to write about the languages I am familiar with) and I like to visualise their relationships as layers of a cake. There are two main ways to categorise programming languages: as having high or low levels of abstraction and as either compiled or interpreted [...]
The six phases in the average game development cycle are illustrated below:
The initial phase of a project is ‘Pre Production’ where the main game concepts and features are brainstormed, designed, prototyped and signed off on. The end goal of this phase is to prove (usually via a demo) the core game play experience and [...]
Mapping user expertise against the user population of a product tends to result in a bell shaped curve. Indicating that most of the user population for a piece of software has an intermediate level of expertise. This is an important observation when developing software as developers (as expert users themselves) will tend to develop more [...]
It is generally regarded that there are three primary properties of a software product: cost of development, performance (speed/memory etc) and software quality. It is believed that you can only ever obtain two of these properties at the cost of the remaining property e.g, you can have high performance and high quality but it won’t [...]