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: just a few weeks apart we get Sony’s conference, Microsoft’s, and, of course, GDC. I’m not even going to count Dice and E3, also happening around the same time. Continue reading
UnitTest++ v1.0 Released
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. Continue reading
Backwards Is Forward: Making Better Games with Test-Driven Development
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. Continue reading
A Day in the Life
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. Continue reading
CppUnitLite2 1.1
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. Continue reading