matt.e.greer@gmail.com
https://mattgreer.dev
https://github.com/city41
https://bsky.app/profile/mattgreer.dev
- city41 parentI dismissed it as too technical for that blog post. I expected this post to be read by a wide variety of people, so I tried to keep technical stuff to a minimum. I did say it's simple and that it's what I'd probably use if I kept going with the project.
- Thanks for the clarification (I'm the blog author). If one were to really make this game, how the cards would ultimately be rendered is hard to say. Sprites are nice because you can overlay them and form many card variations from just a few sprites. Tiles rendering into a background doesn't account for transparent pixels, so building up tiles into a single background is not possible.
One way to handle that is to provide all the possible tile variations, but that would take up so much space. So you'd have a set of tiles for a regular Ace of Spades, and an entirely different group of tiles for a Lucky Ace of Spades for example.
The GBA has 4 backgrounds, so it would be doable to grab three of them and use them to render cards. That would only leave 1 background left for, well, the background :)
Another option would be to use a memory buffer and implement tile rendering yourself that accounts for transparent pixels. That would be the best of backgrounds and sprites combined into one. That would solve many problems, at the cost of the implementation would probably take up a lot of space. My hunch is this would be the best approach.
This right here might be why I find this platform so interesting. It's very limited, and the limitations usually bump into each other and you often steel from Peter to pay Paul.
Oh and the post didn't mention debuffed cards (they have a red X drawn over them). That'd be yet another card layer to throw into this mix.
- But that's basically what fixed point is, no? Half pixels is fixed point with a single bit for decimals. Quarter pixels is two bits, and so on. I think the disadvantage is you now have to think in a strange unit that isn't intuitive. For my game I tend to think in screen sizes for things. Thinking in screen size*factor would be harder I think. Fixed point is basically just doing that for me and hiding the details really.
To be fair, rereading the post I realize I did make it sound like you would only need this for positioning sprites. I'll see about rewording it.
Or maybe we're both talking about the same thing and you're taking a different approach. That is fair too.
- I almost never say "you're wrong", no matter how confident I am. Because I can be, and often am, wrong myself. If there is a disagreement, a miscommunication, etc, why not instead work with the person to find where you two differ and look for common ground? If the other person really is wrong, it's almost always naturally revealed that way.
- https://mattgreer.dev/now
It says last updated today because I really did update it today :)
anyway, cool project!
- > utility classes won’t let you deviate because they’re limited
Tailwind's just in time feature does negate this a bit. I'm a huge fan of Tailwind but I've largely avoided JIT for fear of losing the structure finite classes give me.
Edit: the down votes are interesting as this is literally what Tailwind JIT allows. Their post on it even says "We’ll likely add some form of “strict mode” in the future for power-hungry team leads who don’t trust their colleagues to use this feature responsibly."
- They even designed their plastic type symbol to look like the recycle symbol, even though most plastics can't be recycled.
> The “chasing arrows” symbol we see on plastic containers and products does not necessarily mean the product is recyclable.
https://www.acmeplastics.com/content/your-guide-to-plastic-r...
- This site says just the opposite
> Caffeine narrows the blood vessels in your brain. Without it, your blood vessels widen.
https://www.healthline.com/health/headache/caffeine-withdraw...
- A bad EM can do so much more damage than a bad IC. I don't think that's talked about enough. In my now very long career I've had 1 great manager, a few good/decent ones, and a lot of lousy ones. The lousy ones just make the job so much harder and sometimes outright miserable. A bad EM coupled with junior ICs can be particularly bad combo. At least as I got older I came to realize I can work with bad managers and help move things towards a better place, or bail if I feel it's hopeless.