Dec 30, 2021The mathematically optimal first guess in WordleLike many people on my twitter timeline currently, I’ve been playing Wordle over the past few days. It’s a fun simple little game where you guess 5 letter words, and it tells you how many letters you got correct and if they are in the right positions or not. Part…Wordle4 min read
Dec 21, 2021The games I played in 2021Every year I do a writeup of my thoughts on some or all the games I played throughout the year. At least the ones I have some actual thoughts on. This list is in roughly chronological order of when I played them. Valheim Played it multiplayer with a group of…Gaming10 min read
Published in Geek Culture·Nov 11, 2021How to make your own game engine (and why)So you’re thinking about making your own game engine. Great! There’s lots of reasons to want to make one yourself instead of using a commercial one like Unity or Unreal. In this post I will go over why you might want to, what systems are needed in a game engine…Programming14 min read
Aug 4, 2020How to roll half a diceLets say you’re designing a game where, in order to determine the success of an action, you roll a d20 (a dice with 20 sides). Even if you’re making a digital game without dice, this can be a useful tool for contextualizing probabilities. …Programming7 min read
Jan 3, 2020The games I played in 2019Every year I do a little wrap up of all the games I played over the last year and post a few thoughts on each one. This year, the list is in the order I played them (not the order they released), and not in a ranking order. If you…Gaming13 min read
Mar 4, 2019How to make your game run at 60fpsHere’s the deal. You got a game, and you want to run it at 60 fps on a 60hz monitor. Your computer is fast enough that both rendering and updating take a negligible amount of time, so you enable vsync and write your game loop like this: while(running) {…Programming17 min read
Dec 20, 20182018 Games of the YearHey it’s been a yearly tradition for me to write a few words on every game I played over the past year, so here’s what I played this year. …Gaming11 min read
Jun 29, 2018Using achievement stats to estimate sales on steamRecently a new method of estimating sales data for games on steam showed up on the site barter.vg. They were looking at achievement data and extrapolating how many users would be necessary to get the percents shown. For example, if an achievement had “50%” of players achieving it, that would…Game Development4 min read
