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Simple Sudoku and Modes of Thinking
A while back, I found Simple Sudoku, a freeware Sudoku puzzle maker/solver. It generates puzzles for you to solve, and also has a lot of features to make it easier to solve them. After playing way too...
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Instant Jam Flash Version
Instant Jam was an online rhythm game for Facebook. Its major selling point was “play with your music library”–they provided note charts for songs, while you provided the MP3 files. This allowed them...
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Demo – Stixel
For the last Ludum Dare, I started using Flixel, but ran into problems with how it handled rotation and nested sprites. As a result, on Saturday night I tore out Flixel, and started throwing together a...
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Guitar toy
I was playing with the Flash Player 10 audio API and made a little guitar toy using Karplus-Strong synthesis.
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Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter
Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter was a turn-based RPG on Facebook based on a Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. Players created a character, choosing one of 4 classes and races. They could...
View ArticleArray shuffling
Array shuffling or randomization is one of those things that’s easy to get wrong in subtle ways. The naive way looks something like this (Actionscript): for (var i = 0; i < myArray.length; i++) {...
View ArticleSpiral Code Snippet
I recently needed to make something spiral outwards on a grid. With a bit of experimentation, I found that the steps taken by the spiral always have a pattern like Left Up RightRight DownDown LLL UUU...
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Dungeons and Dragons: Warbands
Dungeons and Dragons: Warbands is a mobile, social, turn-based squad tactics collectible miniatures game based on the tabletop Dungeons and Dragons: Warbands 4th edition rules. Players collect...
View ArticleSimple Optimization – Finding Graphics Bottlenecks
This post is about a time when I was able to use a profiler to very quickly find and fix the cause of a noticeable frame hiccup. I was working on an isometric Flash game with turn-based battles on a...
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Optimization – Choosing the right algorithm
I was working on performance optimizations for a turn-based tactical RPG. There was a noticeable hang when showing the movement highlights after clearing a level, when characters could move freely over...
View ArticleAdvanced Angular UI Router: Nested Views (excerpt)
At ThinkNear, we have an in-house administrative dashboard that our ad operations team uses to set up and manage ad campaigns. The dashboard is an AngularJS frontend with a Ruby on Rails backend, with...
View ArticleUI and Integration Testing for a Full-Stack Javascript App (excerpt)
While developing our new full-stack Javascript app at ThinkNear, we needed to pick a technology for UI and integration testing. For our Ruby apps, we use Capybara with RSpec and the Poltergeist...
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PR Queue Checker
At ThinkNear, every commit must be reviewed before it is merged into the master branch. To do this, the submitter opens a pull request (PR) on GitHub, and assigns it to one of the code reviewers for...
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