Hobby Stuff 2013-2014

by Mike Daly
Aug 10, 2014

I’ve done a few fun hobby projects over the past year.

Board Wars

I tried making a board game inspired by Advance Wars that’s supposed to be like a war game with the complexity of a board game (that’s less complexity, for those of you not familiar with the differences between wargames and board games). I guess we can call this project Board Wars? Anyway, after cutting up and writing out the entire deck of cards, drawing all of the unit icons and cutting them out, and putting together the rest of the game components like the map and guide I decided that I had fun with arts and crafts but I was sick of Board Wars before I even played it. More like BORED Wars, amirite?

Image Formula

On a whim one night, I created a little utility program that lets you enter some C# code in a text box then it would evaluate that code once per pixel to generate an image. It basically works like a poor-man’s pixel shader. The benefit over a pixel shader is that C# is way more powerful since we don’t really care about performance in this case – you can have arbitrary length or complexity with branching and loops. The idea is that if you ever have to create a texture that has mathematical precision (this is often needed for textures that are inputs to shaders), you can generate the texture using the progam easier and more accurately than you would be able to author it in a program like Photoshop (which intentionally hides any math related to it’s operations). The expression you enter just has to assign a value to r, g, b, and a. You can use x and y (and a few other things) as inputs (they’ll be set to appropriate values for each new pixel). There’s an export function that lets you save out a PNG file of specific dimensions.


This is what it looks like; the bottom right panel is a preview of the result

Render Plan

I worked on a data-driven rendering program that let me experiment with some ideas for screen-space FX compositing that I wanted to play with. I got a bunch of infrastructure implemented, but then kind of lost interested when the first few FX I wanted to create didn’t really work out to look as cool as I thought they would. You can specify meshes, particle systems, materials, shader parameters, and rendering steps that include arbitrary offscreen buffers and multiple render targets.


Some sort of fuzzy column of chocolate milk smoke or whatever

Pistol Sisters

So it had been a while since I actually worked on a video game for a hobby project. I had an itch, so I made one. It was pretty fun to work on and I think turned out pretty well. I tried something new this time and as a result you can actually play this game directly from this webpage (without needing to download/extract/install anything or installing any redistributables) which is really cool. The drawbacks are that you still need to have a gamepad, your gamepad may not work correctly anyway, performance for this very simple game will still probably be bad, if you are still using a crappy (old) browser it probably won’t work, and the graphics suck. I guess you can’t have everything amiright? Anyway, check out the game’s page: Pistol Sisters for more info or you can just start playing right away by following this link. Let me know if you had fun.