OS Wars Design

Over the next few weeks I’m going to working on a challenge from the Game Development Society at Uni: to develop a 2D top-down Real Time Strategy Game which uses the A* pathfinding… Continue reading →

SS02: Pong!

Told you there’d be something more interesting this week. I talk a lot about game development on this blog and I’ve never even made a game. What kind of game developer would I… Continue reading →

Nostalgia – it just isn’t what it used to be

You may just think this is a meaningless pun, but I genuinely believe it to be true. A book by my favourite author Jasper Fforde covered this topic particularly well. Simply put, the… Continue reading →

Project Euler

I found a website called Project Euler that gives maths related programming challenges. It reminded me of a weekly competition we had in my high school. Every week a new maths/logic puzzle was… Continue reading →

3DT 02: Wonga

Following the Mario theme (which I suspect I will continue to do), Mario needs some dollar. I think I might eventually render an entire Mario world using the assets I make every Thursday.… Continue reading →

Pikachu!

Pikachu won the poll of who I should paint first from the the original Super Smash Bros. cast. Tada! Just kidding that was just one I prepared earlier. I decided that as I’ve… Continue reading →

TLT 01: Mario Box

With this, the first Timelapse Tuesday, I’m launching my new Youtube Channel: SwartechOfficial This week I recorded myself modelling the Mario Box I made in Blender and also included the full render. So… Continue reading →

The Great Cutscene Debate

I’m about to tackle an area of great contention within the gaming community: cutscenes. There’s a large number of people who loathe cutscenes as they temporarily remove the player’s ability to interact with… Continue reading →

SS 01: CubeSum

Unfortunately I didn’t have much time for the first Software Sunday (being that it’s Mother’s Day) so it’s just a simple program for today. Admittedly this is pretty much copied from a Java… Continue reading →

GIMP

The GIMP is a free open-source image manipulation program available here. I’ve been using GIMP for about 4 years and I’d recommend it to anyone. A lot of people underestimate GIMP because its… Continue reading →

This is a Jak-ing

I realised that despite claiming to be interested in game development, I’ve not posted much about gaming; so I figured I could write a game review. I seem to have gone on a… Continue reading →

3DT 01: Like a BOX!

The first 3D Thursday and also my first foray into the third dimension. I wanted to keep it simple, and what’s more simple than a box? Unfortunately, boxes tend to be quite boring,… Continue reading →

Checkpoint Reached!

Yes, today is the first weekiversary of this blog (I didn’t want to say anniversary, because it has ‘year’ in the name and I couldn’t find another such suitable word). I believe the… Continue reading →

Vital Statistics

Being the geek that I am, I spend a lot of time on my computer. And as my readers are quite possibly of a similar ilk, I figured they might also be interested… Continue reading →

What’s in a name?

As you can see I’ve designed a logo to watermark any new images I post here. It’s hardly the sleekest logo I’ve ever designed, but I had fun making it. Still, it’s not… Continue reading →

Padding my resume

I’ve set up a github account to store all my future code: https://github.com/swartech I could hardly call myself a programmer if the first thing I tried wasn’t ‘Hello World’, but writing in one… Continue reading →

Current Reading List

This is a stack of books I’m in the process of reading. (in no particular order) They’re pretty much all about game development: design, programming and graphics. There aren’t any units on Game… Continue reading →

Choose Your Character!

After writing about the N64, I remembered how much I used to love playing Super Smash Bros. So I’ve been thinking – a dangerous activity, to be sure – that I should have… Continue reading →

From Humble Beginnings

As I’m planning to do some game development, I thought I may as well explain my motivations and talk about my favourite games. (I realised when I started planning this that I have… Continue reading →

Hello world!

Excuse the obligatory “Hello World!” and allow me to introduce myself. My name is Sam Whelan, I’m a 19 year old Computer Science student and right now I don’t tend to do much… Continue reading →