I <3 the Metal shader debugger in XCode. It’s one of those things that feels like they’ve been sent from the future. I’ve been doing shaders in OpenGL for years and years. The last five years I’ve been helping a nice Swedish game company to code casual games with a lot of Candy. And Crushes. More than once I’ve realized that the demos and shaders I did for fun in my teens are the very things that’s putting food on the table for my kids over 100 years later. Read more

Kids love starfields. It’s a perfect coding session with a nice visual result and basic highschool math. We’re going to build this: When coding with kids, always keep it simple and at their level. I know most of you reading this are math wizards but kids tend not to be super impressed by your vector math and matrix calculations (believe me, I’ve tried). You’re going for quick results and simple code, on their math level. Read more

Growing up I loved to play Crazy Comets on my C64. The magic starfield seemed almost impossible to code for a 14 year old and the music by Rob Hubbard totally blew me away. I decided to code a pico8 remake of it together with my 6 year old daughter in order to show her how to make games. We had a fantastic time! Pico8 has the simplicity needed in order to show how everything fits together. Read more