Being a programmer is weird. Sometimes you solve tough problems and feel amazing. Other times you spend 8 hours hunting a missing semicolon. You can feel exhausted, yet have nothing concrete to show. It’s a job full of mental gymnastics, and it’s both deeply rewarding and utterly frustrating.

I’ve multiple times been confronted by blue-collar workers who joke that we, programmers, “just sit behind a screen all day not doing nothing.” And I get it. They work hard, physically. But our jobs are hard in a different way.

Programming can be deeply satisfying. On good days, you solve tricky problems, feel productive, and walk away energized. Other days? You stare at the screen for eight hours and the only thing you accomplished was finding the missing semicolon.

It’s also mentally exhausting. Especially when you’re trying to keep good chunk of logic flow in your head, to solve something or just to understand the code, and then you are interrupted by a meeting, a college or an email notification. Then it takes forever to rebuild that mental image again. And sometimes, it’s not only interruptions, sometimes your brain just loses the thread – you’re in the zone, holding five different logical states in your head, nearly at a breakthrough… and then poof, it’s gone. That mental toll is real. I end some days completely drained.

Meanwhile, physical workers come home and collapse on the couch. We do the same, but not because we’ve lifted anything heavier than a coffee mug.

What frustrates me most about working as a software developer, is spending a full day debugging, changing maybe three lines of code, and having nothing that feels tangible to show for it. You look at your commit history:
“fix typo, fix bug, cleanup” — and you’re like, “That’s it?”

And sure, I’ve had great mentors who reminded me that it’s not about how many lines you write, it’s about writing the right ones. I know they’re right. But there’s a difference between knowing, and feeling it.

Some days, I feel like an imposter. Like if someone reviewed my output, they’d go, “Why the hell are we paying this guy?” And yet, I’ve built real things, fixed real bugs, shipped actual features.

Here is how to do it;
First create the different config files, one for each folder.

.gitconfig-work

[user]
  email = workEmail@work.com
  name = workName
[core]
  autocrlf = input
[credential]
  helper = store

.gitconfig-private

[user]
  email = privateEmail@private.com
  name = privateName
[core]
  autocrlf = input
[credential]
  helper = store

And now the .gitconfig

[includeIf "gitdir:~/workFolder/"]
path = ~/.gitconfig-work

[includeIf "gitdir:~/privateFolder/"]
path = ~/.gitconfig-private

When you now push to repositories located in privateFolder the name privateName will be used, and for the folder workFolder the name workName is used.

Have you ever wanted to just host your repositories at home instead of handing over everything to some lesser trustworthy third-party site? Then this might be a simple solution for you.

Setup

To create the local hosted git repository.

>cd location_for_the_repository
>git init --bare new_local_hosted_repo.git

This will create a folder ending in .git
Now to use it, navigate to where you want to checkout your working directory

>cd working_directory

and clone the newly created repository

>git clone full_path_to_new_local_hosted_repo.git

The workspace is now ready to use, and you can do all the same things you would normally do, using GitHub, Bitbucket or any other online repository.

A Full example:

>mkdir ~/repositories
>cd ~/repositories
>git init --bare best_game_ever.git
>mkdir ~/workDirectory
>cd ~/workDirectory
>git clone ~/repositories/best_game_ever.git
>cd best_game_ever
>touch ./note.txt
>git add *
>git commit -m "initial commit"
>git push

Note: Remember to backup ~/repositories

The game is a simple item fetch game, with a few small jokes in there. It is heavily inspired by the amazing over polisher of all, the one, the only Pixel Prophecy! Also know as Phil Strahl.
He really likes his coffee, so the game needed coffee, and then he has a thing with unicorns, so again the game had to have at least one unicorn.
The gameplay is simple; the unicorn tells you what it want’s to eat, and you fetch it, and the unicorn poops a delicious, huge, coffee bean. The coffee beans can be taken to the coffee machine and made into a hot cup of coffee, giving you a 10% boost in the amount of coffee you contain. At 100% you have won the game. At 0% you have lost.
There are two other ways to loos the game, but that is for you to find out by playing it.
I hope you will spend a few minutes playing, and hopefully enjoy it. Thanks.

– H

Links to the Ludum Dare page, and the HTML5 version.

@INCD021 We wrote a poem about your game Don't Stub Your Big Toe! http://t.co/9NPdGVe8Q1

— Poems About Games (@PoemsAboutGames) October 20, 2014

The #30daydev have already given me so much, and I’m only halfway there. I’ll keep learning..

Now, go make games!

– Henning

It’s an old turn based racing game we used to play on paper when I was a kid.
You have to select one of 8 possible moves, the next move will start by moving the same amount as you did last move.

So if you moved 1 step forward as your first move, the next 8 possible moves will be around 1 step forward from your current position.

The hard part is trying to gain maximum speed and to remember to brake in do time. 70% of the time you gain to much speed and won’t be able to turn in time. BOOM!

Again it took waaay to long to develop. This time caused by a small oversight on my part that took hours to find I missed some coliders/layer in my raycast

Now it’s time for ZZzzzzzzzz………

Now, go make games!

– Henning

As the name sugests you have you yell at the game, to move. The louder you yell the further the player objects move apart.

I added a sencitivity slider to adjust the needed sound volumen to move, so you don’t really have to yell at the game.

The game only works if you allow it to use the default microphone of your computer, so if you don’t want to, then sorry you won’t be able to play.

Have fun yelling at gamejolt

Now, go make games!
– Henning

I had to think of something? Sleeping until 7 and didn’t help, food and a shower.. Now an idea started to form. The void ship from the Dr. Who series and the hunt for the Maquis from Star Trek, void ship = between worlds,  hunt for the Maquis = turbulent and violent space.. hmmm. To the blackboard, and draw 3D, draw 2.5D, ok then 2d.. Couldn’t figure out how I wanted the game to look, as I would like to do it in 2d (haven’t done 3d since unity came out with their 2d support), I just couldn’t squash the 3D into 2D.

Remembering that I only had 48 hours and 5 was gone sleeping, eating and showering already. I had to keep it simple. So why not having two universes, one on top of the screen and one on the bottom, and having to fight invaders from the other universe. So I set out to do so.

What I have ended up with is almost that. Only change is that the enemy ships are wormhole generators that you have to shoot down before they can open a wormhole, and there by destroying the other universe (I have allowed myself some freedoms as I do not know how wormhole from a universe with other lawn of nature would impact our universe or it’s even possible).

You can play the game Join Us! online, or download the PC version here.

Learned a lot, especially not to optimize as much as I do. I have done some things where I thought, this will be slow, but it’s micro seconds, so doesn’t matter. Ended up with at most 10 draw calls which is nothing. Now I have uploaded the PC version and the web version to Ludum Dare I don’t really wan’t to work on it any more, I’m mentally tired and just want to relax and not think about “Join Us!” anymore,  for now…

It’s been fun and amazing to see how much you can do, when you don’t focus on having to deliver something amazing and super polished, but just a game someone would enjoy So hope you will play it, enjoy it, and rate it on Ludum Dare.

Now, go make games

– Henning

Since the last blog post, I have published my small racing game Strazer to Google Play store. 

After updating the graphics, I’m pretty happy with it. It wasn’t meant to be a AAA game

After that I worked for a few weeks on a game about depression, but there was a bug in Unity (OnTriggerEnter2D) that kept giving me problems, so I put it on hold. The bug was fixed in the Unity 4.5 release, so maybe I’ll go back to that again… Later.

And the there are a lot of small POC as always

Save ’em all:

GauntletX:

Forever: 

DefendYourself:

Defend4x8:

All small POC that I might go back and work on in the future.

At the moment I’m working on a game for two friends, one want me to make a zombie game, and the other a platformer, so it is going to be a zombie platformer game

Right now I trying to get some graphics done for the game, it’s coming along but not as fast as I would like, and not as good either.  

This is the melee attack of the zombie. It still is missing shadows and highlights.

So have done a lot, just haven’t blogged about it. I’ve started using twitter a lot more, I like the positive atmosphere and the nice people always there to help.

Have a great day, now go make games!

– Henning