Gravmari Released!

After fifteen weeks, Hubris Arts has completed its first game, Gravmari, directed by Max Rebuschatis.
The game is a journey through the depths of space in a strange and alien ship called the Playertoid. It was inspired by Katamari Damacy, Kubrick’s 2001, the efforts of NASA, and, most importantly, dreams of floating through the cosmos. We [...]

Collision Detection with Enneatrees

Many of my games boil down to, at some level, a large collection of circles (or spheres) interacting with each other. I use circles for collision detection, and otherwise whenever I can for organization, because the results look more natural than using boxes. If you organize using boxes, your simulation will tend to [...]

Maximum entropy and negative probability

I have recently become fascinated with the concept of maximum entropy distributions, and went back and read Dan Piponi’s post on negative probabilities, and link surfing from there. Something sparked and I wondered what kind of connection there is between the two. A little experimenting in Mathematica later and I’m on to something [...]

Gravmari

ost of my time has been spent preparing a game for submission into the Independent Games Festival at the Game Developer’s conference. It’s called Gravmari, a game about gravity and the universe, roughly described as “Katamari in space”. The submission deadline is Nov 1, so we are working pretty hard to get it [...]

IO-free splittable supply

I know it has been a while since I posted, and I’m sorry to say this isn’t a terribly deep or interesting one.
I like the value-supply package on hackage. It takes (essentially) an infinite list of things and arranges them into an infinite tree randomly… but a particularly useful kind of random. The [...]

Forever Unemployed

I recently interviewed for a job in Boston, in which I would get to work with Shae Erisson (shapr) and Edward Kmett, which would be a wonderful treat, of course. But I turned it down after it was described to me. My reasoning at the time was that it was too formal and [...]

Emphasizing Specialization

I have briefly—or perhaps not so briefly, my interests being unpredictable beasts—shifted the focus of my research to lazy specialization. This topic was discussed extensively, but not comprehensively, in Michael Jonathan Thyer’s dissertation, Lazy Specialization, and seems to have received little attention otherwise. This is unfortunate. I consider it a very important [...]

On the By functions

Here’s a quick little note that has been bugging me for a while, and nobody wants to talk about it right now on IRC.
I think the By functions:

sortBy :: (a -> a -> Ordering) -> [a] -> [a]
maximumBy :: (a -> a -> Ordering) -> [a] -> a
groupBy :: (a -> a -> Bool) -> [...]

My Premonition

Last summer I got the opportunity to work briefly with Conal Elliott in Belgium. The two weeks I spent there are still making an impact on me; immediately I resonated with his semantic design idea. But the more important ideas were the ones I picked up subconsciously, and I’m just now becoming able [...]

The role of a core calculus

A lot of software engineering can be described as the art of skillful procrastination. When we’re designing some software, we would like to put off as many decisions as possible as long as possible, while still making progress toward the goal. This procrastination leads to good abstraction, because any code we wrote before [...]