For the month of May, I chose to donate money to the Simple Directmedia Layer, the popular cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer. It is currently at version 1.2, is widely used in games and other media applications, and has bindings to a large number of languages. If you run an operating system, it is very likely that libSDL runs on your system.

Sam Lantinga created the SDL while working at Loki, although there are some people who think he may have written it at his previous job. SDL acts as a thin wrapper over platform-specific APIs. For instance, if you use it on Windows, it wraps around DirectX, but if you use it on a distribution of Gnu/Linux or BSD, it will use XLib. If you think of it as an abstraction, you can code once and compile anywhere. In fact, my Killer Kittens from Katis Minor project can be compiled for my Debian system and for Windows without any code changes if you use a compiler that doesn’t assume you need WinMain to replace the main function.

The documentation is available at the main site, and I’ve always found the SDL Documentation Wiki to be useful. Of the books I’ve read, I would highly suggest Focus on SDL by Ernest Pazera and Programming Linux Games by John Hall. While both books a few years old, they are still relevant and can get you up to speed quickly. You can also find SDL used in the example code a couple of game programming books by Erik Yuzwa at Wazoo Enterprises.

If you are trying to figure out what libraries to use for your project, even if you aren’t thinking about porting it to a second platform, I would suggest libSDL. If all it does is provide a simple abstraction for DirectX libraries, you will still come out ahead, and if you want to port it later, it should be much easier than completely gutting platform-specific libraries and replacing them with another platform-specific library.

Thanks go to Sam Lantinga and the libSDL development community for making a simple-to-use, cross-platform, freely-available tool for game development!

POTM for May: libSDL is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

This month I donated to Vim, the improved vi editor that I use for all sorts of text editing, including coding and configuration editing. The main developer is using all donated money to help AIDS victims in Uganda, which is both a great cause and motivates him to do more development.

While a lot of developers like Visual Studio, and some of those developers use SlickEdit or Code::Blocks as alternatives, I prefer using Vim. It’s a text editor that I can use whether I am at my desktop or logging in remotely. If I move to a different computer altogether, Vim is pretty much going to work as I expect it to. Without it, I might have to relearn a different editor when I am at home, at work, at a friend’s computer, or anywhere else.

I used to use Nano when I first started experimenting with Gnu/Linux since it was the most similar to other text editors, such as Notepad. Once I learned that there are some editors that are much more efficient, I decided to to learn Vi/Vim. Now editing files requires less key presses, and my fingers almost never have to move far from the home row. If I could find a Vim plugin for Firefox to allow me to use it as an alternative editor for text boxes in forms, I’d use it.

I also find that I am still learning ways to improve my efficiency with Vim. Recently the main developer gave a talk called “The Seven Habits of Effective Text Editing 2.0″. There is a video, which is a little longer than an hour, and slides with notes. While I knew some of the tips, some of them were only recently learned, and the talk had a few new tips that should make my future text editing much more efficient.

I do have to say that it can take some getting used to if you are not familiar with Vim. Having a command and visual mode separate from editing mode in a text editor might seem counterproductive, but once you get over that hurdle, you can be up and running in no time. Text editing becomes much more fun and productive.

Even if you don’t care much for Vim, you can also think about using its cursor keys as training for Nethack. B-)

POTM for April: Vim is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

This month I donated some money to WordPress, an easy to use and quite popular blogging tool.

Yes, it is quite popular, supposedly “the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world”, but I figured that it was still not a household name and so was a valid project for the POTM.

My blog uses WordPress, and I have been pleased with how easy it is to use, update, and modify. While the default theme was pretty ugly when I started my blog in 2005, there were plenty of themes created by the WordPress community, which is great because I didn’t want to spend a lot of time creating my own theme.

There are a number of plugins for WordPress, and some of them are very useful. From blocking spam to adding special links easily on your blog, there are plugins for any number of purposes.

Relatively recently, WordPress.com was launched, which allows you to run a blog without needing to maintain your own host. While installation is incredibly easy, you may not want the hassle of maintaining your own website’s security just to run a blog. If you already have a blog using another system, WordPress has plenty of import options. You can import LiveJournal and TypePad, or even use an RSS feed as the source, among other options.

The community is great. I had to figure out how to get an RSS feed to Larry for just the POTM entries, and the IRC channel was a great source of friendly assistance. I don’t know if I have ever felt lost using WordPress since there is almost always someone around to explain something to me.

Thank you, WordPress community!

POTM for March: WordPress is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

For this month’s POTM entry, I decided to go with the Countdown Clock extension for Firefox.

Whenever I install Firefox on a new computer, I always make sure to install a few extensions, and Countdown Clock is one of them. Basically, you use it as a timer to countdown to some future time. You can countdown to a specific date and time, or you could set it to be relative to the current time. I don’t normally use it for long term countdowns, such as to my birthday or a hot date, but I do use it to timebox. Timeboxing is when you give yourself a set time, say 30 minutes, to do as much as you can at a specific task. For example, when I program, I sometimes have trouble getting motivated to do anything, and after three hours, I might have nothing accomplished. With Countdown Clock, I set it for 45 minutes, and it is almost like I am in college again, working on a paper at the last minute. All of a sudden, I’m focused, and sometimes I’m in The Zone. I can get a lot accomplished in that 45 minutes, knowing that I can take a small break once that time is up. I can also reset the timer again, getting two or more sessions of 45 minutes in an evening.

45 minutes also happens to correspond with how often I have to change a load of laundry, so I can work on game development and still know when to head to the laundry room. Timeboxing and clean clothes: a winning combination.

You can set Countdown Clock to popup an announcement, but I chose not to have the popup. The message still appears in the bottom corner of Firefox when the coutndown is finished, and I find that having a .wav file play is good enough for me. I chose to use a long screaming laugh from Gir of Invader Zim. You just can’t mistake it for some music or sound effect from an application I happen to be running at the time.

One of the side-effects of running Countdown Clock is that the bottom of the browser has the last message you asked it to say. It’s weird when it says something like “Get laundry!” or “Time to eat lunch!”, especially when the message makes no sense, but I like to set it to something inspirational. Currently I use “Don’t ruin your mind” to remind me not to idle away at pointless websites when I could be doing something on purpose.

Thanks go to the developer, Frederic Mercille, for making a wonderful extension.

POTM for February: Countdown Clock Extension for Firefox is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

I use GnuCash to keep track of my finances. Even before I started my business, GnuCash helped me to organize my income, expenses, and bills. I have stopped using my checkbook’s registry just because it is easier to use GnuCash to update my savings and checking accounts.

What appealed to me was the familiarity I already had with this system. I took a couple of years of accounting in high school (thanks, Mr. Mullin!), and so I was quite familiar with ledgers, journals, debits, and credits. Don’t think that you need to know accounting to use GnuCash. It’s just that knowledge of the principles of accounting help, regardless of the application or tools you use to balance your books. I haven’t used anything like Quicken or Money, so I can’t comment on them. I do know that when trying to setup either of those programs on someone else’s machine, I had a tough time figuring out how to enter transactions. It just wasn’t worth the effort to figure out how those applications tried to make it “easier” for me.

By the way, if you already use Quicken or Money, it can import your data, so if accounting software is the only thing preventing you from moving to a different operating system, you don’t have to feel that your data is stuck.

GnuCash provides a way to see your financial data in customizable reports, complete with graphs and charts. You can use multiple currencies, track your stock portfolio, manage your small business, reconcile your statements, and schedule transactions. I personally haven’t used all of these features, but I am starting to do more and more. I recently decided to transfer a set amount each month to my ING Direct account, and instead of requiring me to remember to manually enter the amount each month, GnuCash does it for me.

The only feature I am waiting for is the ability to close balances. Supposedly, the code is actually written for this feature, but it is disabled since it has not been tested thoroughly enough. For now, each December 31st, I manually transfer all of my expenses and revenues into a temporary account, then I transfer the balance to my equity account.

To donate to this project, please visit http://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id=192 or learn about other ways to help.

POTM for January: GnuCash is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

While there are some major, ubiquitous pieces of open source such as the Linux kernel, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, and Apache, there is plenty of great pieces of open source out there that doesn’t get funding from companies such as Red Hat, IBM, or hardware manufacturers.

While many would argue that fame is more important than money to open source volunteers, I’ve yet to meet one that didn’t like money as well as fame. Really, who wouldn’t? The goal of Project of the Month is to provide a little of each to open source developers, whether they’re already getting revenue from their work or not. The vast majority of open source code is also free-as-in-beer, and while I won’t say that anything is “owed” to those developers (they do, after all, release their code free-as-in-beer by choice), it’s still polite to acknowledge their work.

POTM has two steps each month:

• Donate $25 USD to an open source project of your choice.
• Blog about the project.

The idea is to promote and show appreciation for the lesser-known open source projects out there. For more details on how to participate, check Larry’s POTM blog post.

Project of the Month is a post from: GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development