Awhile back, on a completely different blog, I discussed the tendency to ridicule others code while simultaneously being self-conscious about our own. As is so often the case, Google has something very smart to say on the matter. Maybe not Google as a whole, but at least two guys who work for Google and were also two out of the three creators of Subversion.
What are the xmice? Basically they are utilities (one command line driven and one with a GUI) that allow you to activate Windows’ ability to let window focus follow the mouse cursor. This lets you do handy things like scroll background windows with your mousewheel, or enter text into them, without bringing them up in front of everything else.
It was a hard fought battle, but I have officially won my second consecutive game demo contest. I am quite happy, if a little bit surprised, by the result. I had expected Brad’s far superior visuals to trump any gameplay advantage I had. I mean, how could I compete with glowy rocks? They glow for crying out loud!
Brad and I have a long and unproductive history of game development together. We’d typically end up with a few sprites, a background, a general idea and some sort of rudimentary cobbling of those things together before we become distracted and move on to other things. This has happened at least two or three times. It is out of this fruitless cycle that the idea of the game demo contest was born…