Game design, game programming and more

Archives for September 2012

StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames

In my previous article about StarCraft I talked about why we rebooted the project and changed it from a follow-on to Warcraft — derisively called “Orcs in space” in 1996 — into the award-winning game that we were finally able to deliver after two more years of hardship. But one noteworthy source of inspiration didn’t […]

Avoiding game crashes related to linked lists

In this post I’m going to talk about linked lists, a seemingly trivial subject that many programmers — even good ones — seem to get terribly wrong! Then I’m going to share techniques (with source code) to make your game engine code simpler, faster, more memory efficient and more reliable. Wow! This post is part […]

Tough times on the road to Starcraft

I’ve been writing about the early development of Warcraft, but a recent blog post I read prompted me to start scribbling furiously, and the result is this three-part, twenty-plus page article about the development of StarCraft, along with my thoughts about writing more reliable game code. I’ll be posting the latter parts over the next […]