As it seems the as far as I know nameless dog from Nintendo Duck Hunt has been spotted in my home town of Kalmar, Sweden. All according to local newspaper Barometern. I'll make sure to check this out myself asap

I guess nerdiness lives and prospers even in the heat of summer

I haven't been very active here at spellofplay.com lately. My time has been divided between work, kids and CrossFit. But now I finally got some work done on Hero and released a new version today on hUb.

Iteration 15 contains a lot of new stuff:

• Drop all items of same kind option
• Boost constitution spell symbol
• monsters depending on level disturbs rest
• Character generation interface
• Only three bodyparts, head, body and shoes
• Enemies can aggravate eachother by speach...
• enemies heal up when you leavel levels
• enemies casts spells
• quick cast spell by doubleclick on spell symbol
• repair in shops
• Active spells bars
• all boost spells should stay when resting but you will not regain mana until they are dispelled
• Dispell spells on clicking on active spell
• use potion quick bar
• sorting of savegames

Enjoy!

Some of you might wonder what I've been up to lately. Besides having a sprint on the site adding support for Twitter login I've been busy starting a research project at the university where I have my daytime job. The general idea is to take some of the experiences (10+ years) from game development and make further experiments to expand, enhance and validate & verify my findings in a scientific way. The result of this process will be a thesis and I'll become a Ph.D.

And without further adue I present my "hyper thesis", a.k.a. vision

Enhancing Quality of Software Architecture in Computer Games

The driving requirement of software architecture in computer games has since long been performance. However, focusing on performance alone often leads to problems in other areas; the software cannot be maintained or changed in an agile way and it becomes hard for developers to react to market changes or advances in hardware. Testing is hard or even impossible in many cases and reuse of code and design is minimal.

Modern approaches to software architecture in computer games, e.g. a modification of the model view controller (MVC) pattern, bear other qualities like changeability, maintainability, testability, and reusability without scarifying performance. This is shown for a number of game types ranging from casual games to multi-player action titles. A standardized software architecture throughout many projects also enhances programmer productivity and project scalability.

Feel free to comment

Oh man I've had two very busy weeks in my "real" life. So busy I've hardly had the time to check the website and little less post anything new.

Things do look brighter now and I hope to get busy developing soon! I've got an update for T.W.T.P.B. in the pipe and also Project L needs some love