this blog chronicles the development of the Exigy shareware development kit.
Date: Thursday April 16th, 2026 Time: 10:45:39 AM MST From: @vga256 Keywords: exigy, data Subject: doing a computing science degree the hard way, or how Tim Cain saved the day Tim Cain once said that the worst, most time consuming part of his jobs working on Fallout and Arcanum, was writing UI code. Unsurprisingly, most coders drag and drop in UI libraries like Dear ImGui and call it a week. "Why…
Date: Saturday January 04th, 2025 Time: 09:22:19 PM MST From: @vga256 Keywords: testing, tomo Subject: A drunken walk roadmap for the next couple of months first - cool news: i found out today that Thom over at OSnews wrote a little article about Exigy! I honestly never imagined anyone would write anything about this project outside of mastodon D: thanks Thom! one question I continue to get almost…
Date: Saturday December 28th, 2024 Time: 08:55:53 PM MST From: @vga256 Keywords: unity, godot, interfaces, design, ui Subject: Why Unity and Godot Suck, and the Joys of Kai's Power Tools This morning I watched this excellent talk by Ivan Safrin , creator of the Polycode IDE/game development toolkit. In the talk, Ivan argues for the importance of free, open-source tools in game development, and…
Date: Saturday December 21st, 2024 Time: 08:55:53 PM MST From: @vga256 Keywords: programming, lua Subject: Visual Programming Languages via Behaviours and Callbacks in Lua I spent quite a bit of time in May figuring out what I call "Behaviours". It's an idea I stole from my days making games with Macromedia Flash (Dreamweaver had it too). Since Flash was designed to be drag-and-drop, Behaviours…
Date: Saturday December 14th, 2024 Time: 08:55:53 PM MST From: @vga256 Keywords: programming, UX Subject: Week 2 - Point-and-click Adventures When I started writing Exigy, I had a few aborted attempts at a point'n'click-driven windowing system behind me. The first, built in Adventure Game Studio, was more or less faked with a clever use of the built-in static GUIs, and a bunch of custom windowing…
Date: Saturday December 07th, 2024 Time: 08:55:53 PM MST From: @vga256 Keywords: programming, history Subject: Week 1 - it's okay to be ugly when you're young My #1 beef with almost any piece of game development software - from Unity to Godot to GameMaker - is always the user interface. Right from the outset, you're presented with an overwhelming number of menus, options, buttons and hotkeys, and…
Date: Wednesday December 04th, 2024 Time: 08:55:53 PM MST From: @vga256 Keywords: programming, history Subject: Where Exigy began Way back in the mid-90s when I was a teenager, I worked a couple of summers at a new regional ISP that served the sub-arctic and arctic regions of northern Canada. The ISP, Snowshoe Inn Micro , was located in the village of Fort Providence - a place of around 500…