Games from Within

I know, things have been pretty slow around here for a while. The good news is that the slience is over.

Charles Nicholson and I decided to take the plunge and create our own game development company: Power of Two Games. So I finally get the chance to follow the dream I've had for a long time!

From now on, I'll be writing mostly on the Power of Two Games web site. We'll talk about about everything from the details on getting a company off the ground to development processes that we're using. But this time we'll be writing much more frequently, so subscribe to our RSS feed and follow us along in this wild ride.

Still curious about how to apply agile development to games? These presentations from Gamefest 2006 and the Montréal Games Summit 2006 give an overview of agile game development, and then get into some of the practices we use at High Moon Studios.

A lot of people have a particular moment or experience that defined their future. It can be anything: reading a particular book, traveling through a different country, meeting somebody special, or going through a very painful (or happy) experience. For me, the future crystallized on a Fall afternoon in 1985, when I sat in front of an 8-bit computer at a friend's house. It was the beginning of a long personal journey.

In the past, I've given presentations about agile game development to two distinct groups of people: game developers without much exposure to agile development, and agile developers who were unfamiliar with game development. This morning I realized how interesting it was to explain the goals and reasons behind agile development to someone completely outside those circles.

Spring was supposed to be the season of flowers, new leaves, and good weather returning. Here in San Diego we don't get much of that, or rather, we get it all year around. So Spring can really sneak up on you, and before you realize it, it's already gone. Spring also seems to be the season for game-development conferences and travel.

We grabbed the best features of each framework and created what we think it's the best C++ unit-testing framework out there (for our needs anyway). We took the results and put them up in Sourceforge under a veryunrestrictive license, and that's how UnitTest++ was born.

We have all experienced how development slows down to a crawl towards the end of a project. We have seen first-hand the difficulty of squashing insidious many-headed bugs. We have wrestled with somebody else's code, just to give up or fully re-write it in despair. We have sat in frustration, unable to do any work for several hours while the game build is broken. Code can get too complex for its own good.

See how doing something so apparently backwards as writing unit tests before any code can help with all those problems.

A couple of weeks ago Jim Tilander, a co-worker from High Moon and good friend, finally took the plunge and started putting some of his writings online. He already wrote two very interesting articles on Python (surprise, surprise knowing Jim) and how to pull in static data for unit tests. I'm sure there will be lots more interesting articles to come.

High Moon Studios is an unusual company in the games industry. We're applying agile methodologies for all of our development. My team in particular is using both Scrum (an agile management methodology) and Extreme Programming (an agile engineering methodology). And yes, that means we're doing pair programming, test-driven development, and all the other often controversial practices. I expect that in a few years, these practices will be a lot more common than they are today.

At this point, we have been using CppUnitLite2 for a year at High Moon Studios doing test-driven development on Windows, Xbox 360, and some PS3. It has been used to unit test libraries of an engine, pipeline tools, GUI applications, and production game code.