Games by Mason Blog

👀 It's Not About the API - Fast, Flexible, and Simple Rendering in Vulkan

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Many programmers consider Vulkan to be overly complex–maybe not even worth engaging with as an indie. It’s easy to see why people feel this way.

If this is how you view Vulkan or modern graphics APIs in general, the goal of this talk is to change your mind.

🪟 Prediction: Microsoft Is Going To Do The Funniest Thing Imaginable

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When you think Microsoft you probably don’t think sense of humor. And yet, I’m convinced that Microsoft is going to do a very specific very funny thing within our lifetimes.

In 2017 I predicted that most programmers would lose their employer <-> employee bargaining power in the next 15-25 years. This was a pretty controversial take at the time, and I never wrote about it publicly, so it’s hard to claim too much credit for being right.

This time I want the credit, so I’m posting my prediction publicly while everyone still thinks it’s ridiculous:

I predict that within 15 years Microsoft will discontinue Windows in favor of a Windows themed Linux distribution.

Sound crazy? Hear me out.

🔉 Statically Linking PipeWire

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently helped Tuple solve an interesting problem. They’re working on a Linux version of their pair programming tool, and they want to make it a fully static executable so that they can ship the same build everywhere.

Alright no big deal, just link any dependencies statically and use musl. Easy, right?

Unfortunately, it’s not quite that easy. Tuple needs to talk to PipeWire for screen capture, and PipeWire makes heavy use of dlopen, so statically linking it isn’t an option…or is it?

I’ve open sourced a build.zig configuration that generates a static build of PipeWire here. The rest of this post elaborates on why this is challenging, why solving it is possible, and how my solution works.

Quick Disclaimer

The build works, and you can use it today! However, depending on your use case, you may need to add more plugins to the library table. See the README for more info.

🖼️ Stop Shipping PNGs In Your Games

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Are you shipping textures to players as PNGs? The goal of this post is to convince you that this is suboptimal, and walk you through a better approach.

I’ll also share my implementation of the suggested approach, but if you’d rather do it yourself I’ll provide you with the information you need to get started.

If you’re using a game engine, it is almost certainly doing what this post suggests automatically, but it doesn’t hurt to double check!

🌴 What I Learned from Staying Inside

Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Conference Site

Okay, not literally staying inside. Every year Chris Zukowski puts on an online conference called Staying Inside about marketing indie games.

I technically watched some of the recordings while outside because the weather’s been great in Portland, but What I Learned From Watching Staying Inside While Occasionally Technically Outside Because The Weather’s Been Great in Portland was too long of a title.

I’m not going to write up a transcript of the entire conference, but I took notes on bits that were relevant to me and figured they were worth sharing.

To kick things off, multiple speakers touched on a big shift in indie game funding that may be of interest even if you aren’t looking for funding.

ZCS — An Entity Component System in Zig

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing a new game engine in Zig, and I’m open sourcing each module as I write it.

Today I released the beta version of my entity component system ZCS, I’ll consider it a beta until I’ve shipped my next Steam game using it. You can find the documentation here.

I’ve written a number of ECSs in the past including the one used by Magic Poser. Going through this process a few times has given me a chance to hone in on what I want out of an ECS and I’m really happy with how this one turned out.

This post walks through some of the main ideas behind my implementation. If you enjoy this kind of writing, consider signing up for my newsletter.

Tweening in Zig

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Lerp, or linear interpolation, is a convenient way to animate stuff in games without having to store much state:

const position = lerp(start, end, time);

This will move position linearly from start to end as time moves from 0 to 1.

Unfortunately, linear motion often appears robotic and unnatural. In fact–even a cartoony robot should overshoot and rattle a bit, right?

Thankfully there’s an easy fix. You don’t have to give up lerp, you can just play with the t value that you pass in:

This isn’t actually game 2, it’s a side project. Not quite ready to announce game 2 yet sorry. :P

The pictured asteroid is being linearly interpolated, but the t value is being modified by an elastic easing function causing it to act like a spring:

const position = lerp(start, end, elasticOut(t, .{}));

Pretty nifty for a one liner, right?

Functions that play with a lerp’s t value are called “easing functions”, you can find visualizations for many commonly used easing functions on easings.net.

It’s nice to have a bunch of these on hand to pick from, so I’ve published a Zig library of all the popular ones. The rest of this post is a brief description of the contents of the library at the time of writing.

Powered by Z[ig|ine]

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Since shipping Way of Rhea last year I’ve been hard at work on game two, but I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like.

Every time I sit down to write a blog post in Jekyll, my Ruby dependencies are somehow broken again. Any time spent trying to sort this out feels like time that could be better spent elsewhere.

As of today, I’m saying goodbye to Ruby! This site is now powered by Zine, a static site generator written in Zig by Loris Cro.

Working with Zine has been a blast. It’s alpha software, but it’s worth checking out.

I’ve also used Zine to setup a devlog as a replacement for Twitter. I’ll continue mirroring my posts to social media, but I think we’re all better off not actively engaging with those sites. I personally replaced my time spent browsing social media with an RSS reader about a year ago and I can’t imagine going back.

Expect more writing soon, I already have a few drafts queued up. If you want to get notified when I post, follow my newsletter or RSS feed!

Highlights from "I spent 6 years developing a game in Rust and it just shipped, AMA"

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I recently released Way of Rhea, a puzzle game that I’ve been working on in Rust since 2018. If you like games like Braid, Talos Principle, or Portal you’d probably enjoy it:

After launch I posted an AMA on r/rust_gamedev, and people asked a lot of great questions!

This write up contains curated highlights from the AMA, with some additional editing for clarity.

Thank you, & the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase

Wed, 22 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hey everyone–thanks so much for a great launch day. After having worked on this game for so long, it’s an amazing feeling seeing so many folks enjoy it. :)

We hit 10 reviews on day 1, and at the time of writing are at 24 positive reviews:

My new goal is to get to 50 reviews so we can be labeled “Very Positive.”

I’m not going to share Steam stats today, but I can tell you that getting 10 reviews increased our visibility by an order of magnitude. Thank you again.

Cerebral Puzzle Showcase

I also wanted to announce that Way of Rhea is getting featured in the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase! The festival runs on Steam from May 23rd to May 30th.

If you haven’t picked up the game yet, I’m extending the 20% launch discount to cover the entire festival:

If you’ve already picked up WoR, there are gonna be a lot of other great puzzle and puzzle-adjacent games on discount or with free demos. I’m looking forward to trying out the latest demo of our friends’ game, Valley of Shadow, in particular.

If I manage to get away from launch stuff long enough to try out some of the games, I’ll share any cool finds in our Discord in the #gaming channel. If you find anything cool, definitely share it with us!

Way of Rhea Out Now!

Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who’s helped make this happen in any way, this is the culmination of years of hard work–I don’t even wanna say how many years it’s been here, if you know you know.

As of now, Way of Rhea is out on Steam! I hope you all enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed making it.

If you want to support me, the best thing you can do is purchase a copy of the game, and then leave a review. My goal is to hit 10 reviews today–Steam will show my game to more people when I do.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to patch Way of Rhea, and get started on Game 2.

If you wanna keep up to date with what I do next, here are some ways to stay in touch:

Way of Rhea releases tomorrow! - The End Game

Sun, 19 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Way of Rhea is coming to Steam TOMORROW!

This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers The End Game.

For many players, the biomes up until this point will be sufficiently challenging, and some players may be happy to solve most of those puzzles and stop.

However for avid puzzle gamers, everything we’ve seen so far is just set up for the real challenge: the end game.

The end game combines everything we’ve learned so far into 4 levels of very challenging puzzles.

Way of Rhea releases in 2 days! - The Professor's Biome

Sat, 18 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Way of Rhea is coming to Steam in 2 days!

This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers The Professor’s Biome.

The professor is kind of a jerk.

This area introduces The Professor, and a new way to change colors using staves.

Way of Rhea releases in 3 days! - Rhea's Biome

Fri, 17 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Way of Rhea is coming to Steam in 3 days!

This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers Rhea’s Biome.

This area introduces Rhea, and color circuits.

Way of Rhea releases in 4 days! - The Overworld

Thu, 16 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Way of Rhea is coming to Steam in 4 days!

This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers The Overworld.

Way of Rhea releases in 5 days! - Snow Crab's Biome

Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Way of Rhea is coming to Steam in 5 days!

This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers the second area in the game, Snow Crab’s Biome.

Hermie got lost in the Ice Caves trying to help his dad, you need to save him!

This area introduces Snow Crab, and how you can use his behavior patterns to solve puzzles.

Way of Rhea releases in 6 days! - Shrew's Biome

Tue, 14 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In celebration of Way of Rhea releasing on Steam in 6 days, I’m making a post a day about a different aspect of the game.

Let’s look at the first area of the game: Shrew’s Biome.

Be warned–this blog series features mild spoilers!

Shrew is your excitable friend who’s very invested in you solving the forest puzzles tonight for some reason.

Way of Rhea releases in 7 days!

Mon, 13 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Way of Rhea releases on Steam in 7 days! In celebration, starting tomorrow I’m making a post a day, each about a new aspect of the game.

Way of Rhea - Release Date Announcement

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today I’m excited to announce: Way of Rhea is coming to Steam on May 20th, 2024!

I want to thank everyone who’ve been patiently waiting for the game to come out–your support means a lot. If you’re excited for the game, the best way to help is:

Wishlist Way of Rhea on Steam
Share the release date trailer with people, communities, or influencers that enjoy puzzle games

I can’t wait for everyone to get their hands on the game. :)

Announcing the Way of Rhea Closed Beta!

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Exciting news–we’re starting the closed beta of Way of Rhea!

I’m going to be running it through our Discord. I’m only adding a couple people at a time so that I have time to address feedback between participants–if you want me to add you to the list, ping me there!

v0.1.0 Release Notes

All levels now have unique music
Marked areas navigable by crabs with crystals
Improved speed controls, speed controls (optionally) affect music
Improved biome progress visuals
Shows controls on screen in more cases
Fixed performance problem with inactive NPCs
Resolved issues connections between some puzzles in the end-game, polished end game puzzles
Fixed problem where if you move slow enough you wouldn’t trigger gates
Added accel/decl to character controllers
Adds more background art to various areas
Makes paths in forest biome more visually readable
Added input buffering
Displays song titles in game
Stops messing with Windows power schemes
Warn instead of erroring when keys can’t be mapped
Improves music transitions and looping
Hub world now less cramped
Implemented all achievements and secrets
Don’t repeatedly warn on save point mismatches Makes first ice puzzle clearer. Previously it was possible to solve it by accident, and it would appear as if the outcome was “random” since the important interaction was happening off screen. Also causes the crab to walk right instead of left carrying the orb, making it visually clearer that they have picked * up since it is sorted in front of them.
Named all levels
Removes some puzzles from the forest biome that were redundant and/or didn’t fit with the spirit of the game
Starts adding character voices (gibberish)
Improves undo/redo further, especially in crab levels
Fixes problem where elevator visuals didn’t align with interactivity
Fixed minor dialogue glitches, improved dialogue
Implements credits

v0.2.0 Release Notes

Ships debug symbols on Windows
Fixed inadvertent red herring in second ice level, crystals now always indicate a path a crab could take
Made navigable areas more visually consistent in the ice biome
Fixed case sensitivity issue that lead to some missing textures on Linux and Steam Deck
Fixed weather related performance issue
Added graphics options to allow for toggling weather and distortion effects
Fixed issue where the first puzzle in the last forest level could be bypassed
Fixed issue where cloud saves wouldn’t sync cross platform

Future beta release notes will be posted to Steam and Discord.

Generating unique values for IMGUI IDs

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

An IMGUI.

Sometimes, you just want some unique bits to use as an ID. Maybe you’re working with an immediate mode GUI, or need to generate IDs for cancellable sounds.

In many cases you could technically get away with manually enumerating the various unique IDs in a header somewhere, but this is very inconvenient–especially in the case of IMGUIs: if you do this, every time you add or remove a UI element, you need to make a secondary change elsewhere in the codebase. You won’t be able to freely copy paste UI code.

Replying to YouTube Comments on my SYCL Talk

Sat, 23 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from 29 years of internet, it’s not to reply to YouTube comments.

Let’s do it anyway!

I gave a talk at Software You Can Love (SYCL) titled It’s Not About The Technology - Game Engines are Art Tools. The YouTube recording premiered on Monday, and there was a lot of high quality discussion in the comments.

LUCID Kickstarter Goes Live!

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A game I do some programming for, LUCID, just went live with its Kickstarter!

I’m sure Eric would appreciate your support. Don’t worry—I’m still hard at work on Way of Rhea—I typically have a few projects in the oven at a time. :)

It's Not About the Technology - Game Engines are Art Tools

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In June, I gave a talk at Software You Can Love titled It’s Not About The Technology - Game Engines are Art Tools. The intended audience was systems programmers, but there are lessons here for people evaluating off the shelf systems as well.

This is a part two to my talk from Handmade Seattle last year, It’s Not Survivorship Bias - On Successful Software Endeavors.

Please note that I’m playing a little joke at the beginning that may not work as well without a captive audience considering the recent Unity BS, so please watch the whole thing before yelling at me.

See my replies to comments here.

Recording (premieres at 12pm PST)

Slides

Make Your Own Game Engine

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recent events have a lot of studios thinking about their choice of game engine, and at first glance, options appear to be limited. But things don’t have to be this way.

For most studios, the optimal short term strategy is to wait and see if Unity is forced to back down. Retroactively altering the engine license for shipped games certainly doesn’t sound legal.

While waiting it out may be pragmatic for existing projects, it doesn’t save you from the nightmare of having your entire business beholden to the whims of Unity Technologies™.

You could decide to switch engines for future games. Many people will go to Unreal. I trust Epic more than I trust Unity, in particular because they give everyone source access, but if you’re switching anyway I recommend looking into the free and open source engine Godot which is MIT licensed. Info on console support here.

There is, however, another option. The nuclear option.

You could write your own game engine.

Way of Rhea - Linux and Steamdeck Support!

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My puzzle game Way of Rhea now runs natively on Linux, and Steam Deck! This is in addition to the existing Windows support.

The new demo also has some quality of life improvements–namely the ability to pause and fast-forward time.

You can give the free demo a try here, if you run into any issues please [email protected]" target="_blank">let me know. :) Please note that if you’ve ever run the game through Proton, Steam will default to Proton despite the presence of a native build. The UI does not always reflect this correctly, you need to toggle Proton on and back off.

The rest of this post covers some technical details for those interested in the porting process, and unfortunately, announces that I’m dropping the planned macOS support.

If you work at Valve and want to review the build so we can be part of Steam Deck Verified, that would be much appreciated! I’m also happy to help you repro the bugs I worked around if they aren’t known issues, [email protected]" target="_blank">shoot me an email.

Thoughts from GDC '23

Mon, 01 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Posting this a little late, but I had a great time at GDC this year! I got to catch up with a lot of people I don’t get to see very often, and meet a lot of new folks.

On top of that, a member of GUMBO won the IGF Grand Prize, and the Nuovo award, with his game Betrayal At Club Low. You should play it–Cosmo makes great games, and you don’t have to take my word for it this time what with the whole winning the IGF thing.

I’ve written up my personal takeaways from some of the talks I attended below.

It's Not Survivorship Bias (Talk)

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hey everyone! I recently gave a talk at Handmade Seattle titled It’s Not Survivorship Bias - On Successful Software Endeavours on why some software projects find an audience and others don’t, with a focus on independent games.

I’m working on converting this talk into a blog post, in the meantime here are the recordings & slides!

Talk Annotations @ The Handmade Guide

Q&A Annotations @ The Handmade Guide

If you enjoyed this post and want to be notified about future posts, you can sign up for my mailing list or follow my RSS feed).

Sharing this post on your social platform of choice is always much appreciated.

Making Your Game Go Fast by Asking Windows Nicely

Thu, 13 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

original: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=197252&picture=speed-limit-45

Normally, to make your software go faster, it has to do less work.

This usually involves improving your algorithms, skipping work the user won’t see, factoring your target hardware into the design process, or modifying your game’s content.

We’re not talking about any of that today. This post is a list of ways to make your game run faster on Windows–without making any major changes to your game’s content, code, or algorithms.

I employ these optimizations in Way of Rhea, a puzzle adventure written in a mix of Rust and a custom Rust scripting language. While this project is written in Rust, all the optimizations listed here are language independent–where the translation isn’t straightforward I’ve provided both Rust and C++ examples.

When To Rewrite

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Alright, why not. :)

Merge Conflicts: Avoiding Them, Making Them Less Painful

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hey Mason could you explain to me a safe way to use github with multiple users for a Unity project? I know a little about github, and I’ve set up the project with the Brackeys’ tutorial. That all went great. I even have the other people pulling the project onto their machines successfully. And I can successfully do a push from mine. My concern is what if they make changes, and want to push. Do I need to do a push first before they do or do they need to do a pull before they do a push? I’m a bit confused on the sequence, and in 120 the git got all screwed up and that has me concerned!

Normally, I reserve this blog for updates on Way of Rhea, or low level engine work. This post is a little different.

Way of Rhea is entirely self funded. Some of that funding comes from savings from when I worked full time as a programmer, some of it comes from freelance work ¹, and the rest comes from teaching grad and undergrad students game dev.

Regardless of whether I’m currently teaching grad or undergrad, Unity or engine dev, general C++ or graphics programming, there’s one key programming skill that nobody seems to ever teach my students before they get to my class: version control.

I’m not sure why this is. I suppose everyone hopes someone else will talk to them about it. Regardless, I always make a point to spend a little class time on version control, because I can’t in good conscience watch my students struggle through multi-week assignments without a VCS.

Today, I got the really great question above from a student. I spent a few minutes writing up an answer, and then realized, I should probably save this answer somewhere so I can point future students to it.

So, that’s what this post is! A public note to myself for later. My answer follows.

Hey everyone! @Rob mentioned having issues with merge conflicts in git, and I realized I never talked about these. If you’re not using git, this may not be relevant to you, but if you are it’s probably worth reading on!

How To Write a Crash Reporter

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

So. Up until last week, Way of Rhea did not have a crash reporter. This is kind of a problem!

We’re a small, self-funded team. Our initial reviews could have a big impact on sales. The last thing we need is for an easily fixable crash to mess up our day one reviews!

I’ve tested the various aspects of the game on a large variety of setups, but there’s always a configuration you’ve yet to test. I’ve participated in lots of events with test builds, but I doubt most players will bother to report when a free demo crashes unless they’re already very invested, or reporting it is very easy.

So. Let’s make it easy!

Fullscreen Exclusive Is A Lie (...sort of)

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Fullscreen exclusive is a real thing your computer can decide to grant a window, but, as of yet I haven’t been able to find a single game where the fullscreen exclusive vs borderless window settings consistently do what you’d expect them to.

If you’re an expert in this topic and believe this post is incorrect in any way, definitely [email protected]" target="_blank">email me or DM me on Twitter and I’ll issue a correction!

If you’re interested in jumping to the conclusion, see Testing Fullscreen Exclusivity in Other Games and Takeaways. If you’re interested in my methodology, read on.

Setting a Rust Executable's Icon in Windows

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This morning, I decided it was long overdue that Way of Rhea get its own icon.

I believe that if you’re building a project in Visual Studio there’s a UI through which you can change your exe’s icon–but I’m not a Visual Studio user. It took me quite a while to figure out how to set an exe’s icon from the command line, so I figured I’d document what I learned here in the hopes of saving someone else some time.

It’s possible to dynamically load and set a window icon via code, but for the icon to show up in the file explorer it actually needs to be baked into the executable. This makes sense–explorer.exe shouldn’t have to have to run an executable to determine its icon!

The rest of this post will walk you through how to do this. The only Rust specific bit is the syntax by which I pass arguments to the linker.

Notes from the Q&A Sessions with Steam

Sun, 04 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I recently attended the Steam Q&A hosted by GamePlay Space, and I took a bunch of notes for myself. A few friends asked about the event, so I figured I’d just upload my notes somewhere I can share.

If you’d prefer to read a summary over the raw notes, Chris Zukowski put together some takeaways in his article “What does Valve say you should do to sell your game on Steam?”, and Simon Carless wrote some of his thoughts up in “The ‘mysterious’ Steam algorithm - not that scary?”.

Symmetric Matrices & Triangle Numbers

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

With Santa Cruz officially in lockdown due to COVID-19, I’ve been at home a lot working on Way of Rhea. Since I’m left without any excuse for not posting, here’s a neat proof I happened across while working on some new puzzles. :)

Way of Rhea's Entity System

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I posted this poll on Twitter few weeks ago:

Entity systems won by a long shot, so that’s what I’m going to be writing about today.

In particular, I'm going to outline the process that lead me to Way of Rhea's current entity system. Way of Rhea is being built in a custom engine and scripting language written in Rust, but the ideas described should still be applicable elsewhere. Hopefully this writeup will be found helpful, or at least interesting. :)

Artists' Alley #2: Inspiration and Learning from Others

Sat, 30 Jun 2018 00:00:02 +0000

These past two weeks I have been drawing inspiration from other side scroller games in order to develop a style unique to [Way of Rhea]!

I have found Braid to be a particularly good source of guidance because it is a successful game with an inspiring art style. The art for Braid is both as encapsulating as it is functional. Additionally, this is the first serious game I’ve worked on, so it helps that Braid’s artist, David Hellman has a SUPER amazing process blog of his own out. I’ve been using this blog as guidance for how to approach our project here at [Games by Mason LLC].

One of the steps Hellman used to create Braid’s art was tracing. He traced scenes from games such as Mario, re-making them in possible Braid styles. I’ve traced a few levels from Braid and other side scrollers with focus on incorporating the color schemes from last post into more functional and stylized “screenshot” scenes.

Through this exercise, I’ve stumbled upon things I would like to incorporate into the game:

Angular “rocks” (which can easily change to suit new color schemes and make variable puzzle pieces
Foliage which can be easily made into variable puzzle pieces.
A brighter foreground and a dimmer non-interactive area
The use of water as an obstacle (I would like to imagine the Sprites would melt on contact!)

This tracing exercise has also made it apparent there are some things I need to correct/ think more about as the journey of creation continues:

While I like the jaggy rocks, I’ll have to make sure the “walkable” areas need are obvious and completely intuitive.
The pools are a really fun and aesthetically pleasing. But I’ll need to do some soul- searching and peer review to make sure they are not too distracting.
The interactive pieces (gates, teleporters, etc..) need to look a bit more detailed.
I think I’m on the right path, but the non-interactive background needs to be developed a bit more!

Below are some “traced” pieces and the original screenshots:

My art

Braid

My art

Traced screenshot 1

Traced screenshot 2

Scripting Language APIs

Sat, 30 Jun 2018 00:00:01 +0000

Stack Based API

The first API I came across for talking to a scripting language from engine code was Lua’s stack based C API. Here’s hello world executed in Lua, from a C program:

lua_getglobal(ctx, "print");
lua_pushstring(ctx, "Hello, World!");
lua_call(ctx, 1, 0);

Let’s break that down. First, we push the function we want to call onto the stack:

lua_getglobal(ctx, "print"); // [print]

Next, we push any arguments that we want to pass to the function:

lua_pushstring(ctx, "Hello, World!"); // [print, "Hello, World!"]

Lastly, we call the function, and specify the number of argumetns we have and return results we expect:

lua_call(ctx, 1, 0); // []

On one hand, this is a lot of boiler plate, and you can get it wrong for example by pushing the wrong number of arguments.

On the other hand, this is very flexible. You’re directly talking to the interpreter, so you don’t need some common subset to exist between the two languages to make things work, and you’re not limited by what template magic was able to accomplish.

Higher Level APIs

When I started designing my language, I figured I could do better than this. I’d heard about people using template metaprogramming in C++ to reduce the boiler plate it takes to call Lua, and figured I’d just build my language to support that kind of API in Rust to begin with.

I ended up with this:

let print: Fun<(ScriptString,), Result<(), Panic>> = vm.lookup("std", "print").unwrap();
let message = ScriptString::new(&mut vm, "Hello, world!");
print.call(&mut vm, message);

Alright well it turns out it’s not actually less code, but it is statically typed. Through lots of crazy generics and some codegen I’m able to pass (opaque) struct pointers from the scripting language to Rust as well.

The problem with this approach is simply that the implementation is super complicated, and it assumes that features in one language necessarily translate to features in another. I think if you’re gonna go this route, you should define a common subset of each language that are easy to expose to the other from the start–I didn’t, I started with the goal over everything being available to this interface, and as time went on and I added more features to the language, found that some features either realistically didn’t translate well or weren’t worth the time it would take to implement.

extern “C”

So, where does that leave us?

Well, the higher level approach suffices for now. It’s not ideal, but it’s not worth changing for the time being either because it’s getting the job done. I think if I was tasked with improving the situation without making any other changes to the language, I’d probably look for a compromise. Maybe the latter API style is built on top of the former, or maybe I go with the higher level API but just set a very small subset of the language that gets expose that way from the beginning.

I’m not planning on doing either of those things, because I’m planning on making a bigger change to the language that allows for another approach–

After I ship Way of Rhea, I’m going to try my hand at writing an x64 backend for my game. I originally targeted a bytecode because the conventional wisdom says that that’s what you do to be platform independent. Maybe that was true in the past, but…

Most of my players are on Windows, and everyone on Windows is on x64 nowadays. I don’t even have to care about executable format for non-Windows users who are still on x64–the game will just compile all the code at runtime, and then jump into the compiled code.

What does this look like from an API standpoint? Well, we just need both languages to support the C ABI and we’re ready to go. I haven’t written this yet, but I imagine it’d look something like this:

extern "C" {
	fn print(_: *const c_char);
}

let message = CString::new("Hello, world!").unwrap();
unsafe {
	hello(message.as_ptr();
}

It’s as if we implemented option 2 for a subset of the language, but:

It requires very little implementation effort (assuming we’re already targeting x64 and using a superset of the C ABI)
We can now talk to any language that supports the C ABI

Artists' Alley #1: Abstract Palettes and Environment

Sat, 30 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Artists Alley is a segment which provides a behind the scenes glance into the artistic process for [Way of Rhea (WoR)].

This segment is essentially a journal that helps me keep organized and focused. Additionally, I hope these updates will provide insight to other newbie gaming artists, game developers who are working with artists, and curious individuals.

That said, I am beyond excited about this project! And I hope you all will join me on this journey full of magic, whimsy, and learning <];{D>

So far, I am happy about the existing color palette for [WoR]. I have been exploring how this palette can be manipulated to create different environments and moods. This can be done by changing weight on different colors within the palette.

For instance, when pale pink is the most prominent color, the world becomes a bit bubble-gummy and light.

While oranges, and deep purple dominating the scene brings to mind more mysterious deep feelings.

Aesthetics I want to achieve, when I get a better feel for setting include: A sense of curiosity, mystery, a pinch of fun, and a color scheme that can be variable for different moods.

As the game progresses and the plot unfolds, the background will reflect intended emotions. Some levels will be a bit darker, and should feel a bit scary. While other levels should be light and whimsical. In addition to color, terrain make up is important for game design. Different terrains can lead to different obstacles (water, vines, gaps, etc…)

Another factor to explore through environment is physics. What is the gravity of the environment? Are there any special ‘rules’? [WoR] is a puzzle game. So if for instance, the terrain is mirrored, the character you are controlling can have a reflection plane which mimics the players moves. To make things interesting, there could be some ‘inconsistencies’ between these planes, and the player can switch planes to solve puzzles and overcome obstacles.