Games Development: A poster child for learning maths at school?

I catch the train to work most mornings. I get so much screen time every day I often like to zone out on the way to work. Driving, avoiding pedestrians and other cars cuts into my zone out time. The train works for me. I don't have to concentrate. I can look out the window, watch people and occasionally eavesdrops on some conversations people are having on the train. Yes, I'm kind of a sticky beak.

The other morning I was largely alone in my section of the train. I was joined at the next stop by half-a-dozen teenage guys in school uniform on their way to school. In fairly typical teenage boy fashion they were talking loud, all pumped in the presence of their mates and talking about people they went to school with.

After several topic changes which I couldn't follow (I don't think I'm across even half of what is 'street' these days) they settled on a conversation about how much maths sucks.

Bigfoot zitty kid : "Maths is so lame. You never use that crap. Like algebra.. what are you going to ever use that for?"

Sporty kid : "Yeah my dad reckons he's never used maths since he learned it, it's stupid - why do they even teach stuff like calculus. When the hell would you ever use that?"

Nods of agreement all around.

I didn't find it particularly surprising. In fact, I'm pretty sure I had a conversation just like that around the age of 15.

What I did find ironic was the next topic of the conversation I was sneaky beaking on. They started talking about video games, and how cool it would be to make them. It struck me as ironic, because right there in front of them was a profession that actually used maths, and potentially quite heavily, to actually do things that are interesting to this demographic. It occurred to me right then - that Games Development is quite possibly the perfect poster child career for demonstrating to kids what value you might actually get from learning maths.

Modern games are using plenty of math. Every interaction on the screen is a cascade of vectors, linear algebra and geometry. You've often got some Newtonian Physics thrown in there for good measure too.

I wanted to interject, but I resisted. I didn't want to blow my cover as the zoned out guy in the corner, I wanted to hear about what games they enjoyed playing.

Chris K.

Eets: Hunger it's Emotional - Released for Macintosh OSX

Somewhat belatedly we're pleased to announce the release of Eets: Hunger it's Emotional for OSX! It was released on Steam last December, and you can check it out here

Whew. That was quite an effort for a small team like ours. It was a labour of love. While it's not the only thing we've worked on this past year, we've certainly taken our time when getting it done.

While it is a port (for us) and the game content had already been completed since the release of the PC version it was still not a jobn for the faint of heart.

Klei Entertainment when originally developing the game had not envisaged that the title would be destined for several other platforms. As such it was written largely in native windows APIs such as DirectX, Direct sound, windows threading and so on. There was little abtraction in the graphics, sound and IO layers.

So we added all of that. We abstracted the graphics layer and put into place an OpenGL driver for the OSX port, we went through a similar process for sound support making use of OpenAL. For threading we just used pthreads for the most part. Perhaps we should have abstracted but we didn't in that case. The shaders were written in DirectX style assembly language and to move them over to OpenGL they were ported into HLSL.

Everytime we finish a title we're reminded of what it takes to actually finish a game.

You feel like your done, when it's feature complete; the graphics and sound are working, the control system is squared away and yet - you're really just half way.
We admit we felt like we'd finished when we reached this feature complete stage; we knew better intellectually but emotionally we fell for it all over again.

At feature complete, you start the gruelling bug fixing stage. It's amazing how many bugs a few good testers can find. We had hundreds, many pretty small but it adds mountains of time to completion. After bug fixing, you then have to package and prep for distribution, this is also suprisingly time consuming. Sorting out distribution platforms quirks, further testing, prepping marking art, liasing with the publishers, partners, testers, reviewers and so on - and we had a lot of help.

Nothing really beats the feeling of finish a title though. At least from our point of view. There is something deeply satisfying about it. I guess that's why we're in this business.

We hope you enjoy Eets for OSX! We certainly enjoyed getting it out there.