Troy GilbertGamedev 2.0

It’s been almost a year since I’ve posted to this blog. Wow. That’s kinda inexcusable. I know this meta post doesn’t count toward breaking that trend, so I hope to write something worth reading and get it up here before the actual one year anniversary of the last real post (which would be in a week or so). Fingers crossed I do that.

I’ve also been wanting to restructure the site. A traditional dated blog isn’t really the right vibe. I want to emphasize the topics and articles more, less the chronology. I may comb through my posts and kill the irrelevant ones and keep the articles that say something interesting.

I also may move from WordPress, but really, what’s the point in doing that? I don’t need all the extras of WordPress, but I don’t necessarily need something leaner (particularly since WP-SuperCache or whatever can handle any surprise Reddit front pages).

Here’s hoping I can come up with something decent to write about this week…

I’ve been making a few updates to the organization of the site. Sorry if this caused the RSS feeds to refill with old entries. Things should be settled now for a while.

I updated the sidebar to include links to myself elsewhere, places updated slightly more often than the blog.

I wanted to specifically point out Dribbble. Excellent site built by Simplebits that’s just recently come out of a private beta. I’ve made one post so far, but I’m trying to put in a schedule of posting something daily. There’s some incredible talent on there producing great stuff.

As many have pointed out, the release model for this site was fantastic. Perfect for a site full of user-generated content produced by avid content creators. It was invite only, and the number of posts is limited (30 a month, I think). I’ve got a site bubbling right now that I’m thinking about applying a similar mechanism to.

Now that Dribbble is public, folks will get to see me working on the next big thing! ;-)

Ryan has recorded another pair of my blog posts over at Industry Broadcast. I originally wrote the articles over two years ago. Very strange to hear someone reading them. While I remember writing them, they don’t seem like my writing when hearing someone else read them (they sound better!).

If you’re interested in hearing someone read aloud my blog posts, check out IndustryBroadcast.com.

via reddit

Pete’s QBASIC / QuickBasic Site has a beautiful section on the “QB Philosophy or Why we still program in QB.“. I didn’t read through all of the personal stories, but just in the first dozen there were some that hit home. I’m also fascinated by how many include stories about parent and child programming together — now, that’s something you don’t hear about like you should.

I think Flash/ActionScript could almost be the next QB… but maybe AS2/3 have gone too far beyond? What if someone made a QBasic interpreter that ran in Flash and thus was trivially shareable on the web? I guess this would be like a fancier version of the C64 Emulator that’s been written in AS3. Hmm… somebody get on that!

I wish the Flash Player had just a bit more performance… people are doing some wild stuff with 2D physics and particle systems.