A few weeks ago I decided I am fed up with the current state of things particularly in the demoscene (but also a bit in game development) when it comes to using a prepackaged engine versus people knowing or learning how to use their own thing, so I put together a quick tutorial for how to write the beginnings of a framework that renders a mesh and plays some music - it took less than 400 lines of C++ and about 40 steps.

Is it perfect? No, of course not, nothing is ever perfect or finished, but my hope is really to dispel this notion that writing rendering code is the privilege of a select few, because it’s easier than people think.

Not exactly a text post, but here’s a video recording from my talk from Evoke about how we turned age-old diskmags into something web-readable. Best enjoyed if you’re into byte-level hackery, reverse-engineering, oldskool DOS culture, and self-indulgent projects no-one understands.

I also hope to get a post about my DOS demo up at some point, because it was a project I had a ton of fun with, and it was super-cathartic to work on.

There’s something to be said about unwanted situations that jostle bits of your creative thinking that you wouldn’t otherwise really care to use: this was pretty much the case a few weeks ago, when Slyspy/UF decided to announce a 30 second demo compo, and our little contribution caused me to try out a few things that I’ve faintly considered to be a good idea, but never really had the situation to try out.

Below are a few bits and pieces of the process that contributed to the creation of the intro.

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So this might be an unusual post for a site that I predominantly intended to be a collection of tech-articles, but over the recent years I’ve both been observing and noticing in conversations that while there’s plenty of technical material online about how to learn to program, do graphics, engineer music, and so on, much of the writing about how to get projects done seem to veer over into either “life hacks” about how you should do stretches and open your window for fresh air, or escalate into the territory of motivational speeches and emotional, heart-to-heart peptalks; now, while I understand and appreciate their usefulness in certain scenarios, they seem to cultivate a misunderstanding that all you need to get a project done is a positive attitude and ab-crunches.

After having been in an industry for 10 years that has a relatively high throughput, and having had many relatively recent conversations with people who were in awe or disbelief about my ability to handle large projects, I was reinforced in my belief that most people are unaware how much of getting a large amount of work done is down to cold science, scheduling, professional planning, and the ability to retain control of a project even when unexpected events happen.

With that in mind I’d like to present a few random bits and bobs about what I learned about project management - not necessarily only in programming, but in any sort of creative activity - while hoping to keep the popular psychology element in them to the mininum.

A quick note before we dive right in: I’ll be talking entirely about sparetime activity that you want to invest time in. While it can be useful to apply professional techniques to your sparetime activity, you should definitely not treat the two as they’re one of the same. That’s a good way to hate what you used to like. (Trust me.)

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Those of you who have been following this year’s edition of Revision probably remember the unexpected twist in Sunday’s timeline, where I was pitted in a coding “battle” against two of the best shader-coders in the world to fend for myself. Admittedly the buzz it caused caught me by surprise, but not as much as the feedback on the final shader I produced, so I hope to shed some light on how the shader works, in a way that’s hopefully understandable to beginners and at least entertaining to experts, as well as providing some glimpses into my thought process along the way.

But before we dive into the math and code, however, I think it’s important to get some context by recounting the story of how we got here.

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