Hello! Belated merry Christmas and a very happy New Year!

Right, now the social niceties are out the way let's get down to it. I play World of Warcraft (WoW). There, I said it. No/some shame. I also run Linux. LMDE 2 Betsy to be exact. That's Linux Mint but based on the Debian repositories, so I'm not shackled to the whims of Canonical. WoW is targetted at Windows and OSX, but that's okay, as Wine handles WoW fairly well.

LMDE Betsy is currently based on Debian stable (Jessie), which uses Mesa 10.3.2. Let's see how the Battle.net desktop client renders with this setup:

Erm... right... obviously some issues there. Reading around a while back, I learned that this is because I'm running an Intel chipset with an old version of Mesa. To get things looking pretty, I'd need Mesa 10.4 or later. So now … Read more

Click here for part I.

Much of Saturday was spent laying down the game code. I worked on some of the game backend, creating an object-orientated interface to the game world and levels. The world would be split into several rooms, and each room would contain a series of blocks, some of which the player could interact with. Inspired by Spelunky, we decided to store our level layouts in ASCII files to simplify level editing.

At 6pm on Saturday a mini-showcase was held. This was supposed to be an intermediate deadline to work towards to try and get something playable that could be worked with over the next 21 hours. By this point we had code that compiled and a character that could be moved around the screen. But the rest of world and all the game physics were missing, so we still had some way to go. In actuality … Read more

It's 10pm on Friday night and I'm sat in the computer lab in ECS at the University of Southampton. My mind is racing, full of what needs to be done and what I have to do; it's hard not to feel a little overwhelmed. No, this isn't some desperate slog in the last chance saloon to make a university assignment deadline. Earlier this year I signed up to take part in the Global Game Jam 2015.

I'd never written a computer game before, and the opportunity to get stuck in and work with others to produce something like a game really grabbed me. So, perhaps naively, I signed up. But still, I couldn't help but feel a little apprehensive. I wouldn't describe myself as a hardcore gamer. I play TF2, Minecraft and WoW on occasion, but I've never really got past the casual stage of gaming. Did I have enough … Read more