J'ai une DS

Pour l'instant, elle ne me sert qu'à jouer à Mario & Luigi: Superstars Saga, mais j'espère bien pouvoir faire plus ... Avec l'annonce d'un New Super Mario Bros, d'un nouveau Zelda et d'un nouveau Yoshi's Island, ça devenait nettement plus tentant qu'avec un Nintendogs ou un Mario 64 contrôlé au stylet...

Got a Nintendo DS. Mostly because there are great games announced this year (unlike the uninspiring nintendogs of last year), and some good GBA titles as well (kirby, zelda and maybe some Mario Bros. or DK). Maybe I'll do some homebrew games in the future. If not on NDS, at least I know it is possible on GBA.

Welcome to the Tagtionary

Over the years, this blog has grown and explored many directions: level design, implementation, pixel art, ... I won't claim it covers all you could ever wonder about game development, because I'm focusing on games that catch my attention and that leaves away entire genres.

At some point it became necessary to create a "dictionary of tags" and that became the tagtionary. Feel free to use it to see what is to explore. You're at the entrance gates of some ancient city. It isn't quite abandoned yet.

What will you read next ? 

widget (t.a.g.)

"widget" is a category of coding-related posts that discuss programming the GUI components of libgeds used in the *EDS tools and runME.

It's not quite 'user interface', which instead discusses what sort of widgets/activities/feedback are interesting for a desired user experience, nor 'user guide' which present how to use the *EDS tools themselves.

No, it's really a sub-part of the 'coding' posts, but which are very unlikely to have any mean if you're interested to use the GEDS game engine. That's more for the "applications" section.

user interface (t.a.g.)

You're done reading posts of the "user interface" category.

These described thoughts about human/software interaction for tools rather than the mechanics used in video games. Sometimes it introduces new widgets, sometimes I'm just taking a step back and revise the existing UI in terms of accessibility, ergonomy or ease-of-use.

It's not to be swapped with user guides that present how the software with that interface can be used to achieve the desired actions.
Voilà, vous avez lu tout ce qu'il y avait dans la catégorie interface utilisateur. On y retrouve les réflexions sur les interaction homme-machine, plus pour les programmes outils que pour les mécaniques de jeux. Oarfois on on y parlera de nouveau widget et parfois je prends juste un peu de recul pour réfléchir aux interfaces existantes, leur accessibilité, leur ergonomie ou leur simplicité d'utilisation. A ne pas confondre avec les guides d'utilisateur

Unit-test [t.a.g.]

I'm not a unit-testing guru, but at some point, I had to start running automated tests on my game engine because it became more complex and I had less and less time to spend pressing 'STEP' buttons in emulators and debuggers.

I still struggle a bit to decide whether what I'm doing is unit testing or not, but I encountered two qualities that "allow" you to claim you're doing unit-testing:
- the test is "fast" to run (shorter than recompiling the project, at least?)
- the test helps you localize problems.

It's a kind of time-investment compared to guru meditation.

tutogit [t.a.g]

Well, if you're an English reader, chances are this category wasn't convincing for you. There's a good reason for that: the set of presentation posts that was used to promote the libgeds tutorial branch on github was initially posted on gbatemp forums. There was a french translation too, but on deserted boards that are likely to turn 404 fairly soon. 

But don't worry: the whole story in English is now available as a pdf.

sketch (t.a.g.)

You have just reached the last post in the "sketches" category. This tag is assigned to all those posts which features an original doodle (usually from the Bilou's world characters) as an illustration. Quality may vary widely depending on the time I took to draw the illustration -- i.e. it hasn't an artwork quality level -- and the technique I used to make it enter the digital world, but it should focus on original material (that is, not seen yet on an older post here or in the Bilou's Book

Voilà, c'était le dernier billet dans la catégorie croquis. J'ai marqué "sketch" tous les posts qui ont un petit dessin original pour les illustrer (d'habitude avec des personnages tirés de l'univers de Bilou). La qualité est assez variable en fonction du temps que je me suis laissé et de la technique pour numériser l'idée, mais il s'agit bien de choses créées pour les besoins du blog et donc pas de petit extrait du Bilou's book.