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helbl.ing
Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Draper Laboratory, Programming Language Theory & Gamedev are my jam
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I finally found the name for an interesting optical effect that I've seen used in some advertisements online: chromostereopsis. Maybe someone can come up with a gamedev use case? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromos... #gamedev #gaming

submitted 17 hours ago • 0 comments

I finally found the name for an interesting optical effect that I've seen used in some advertisements online: chromostereopsis. Maybe someone can come up with a gamedev use case? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromos... #gamedev #gaming

submitted 17 hours ago • 0 comments

Desolus is now playable on Steam for the very first time as part of the #CerebralPuzzleShowcase! Go download the demo!!

submitted 11 days ago • 2 comments

Today I started using the new Unity UI toolkit, and imo it's now a superior experience to the old game object based UI. The new toolkit is XML/CSS based, and it has a really slick visual editor. Unity has successfully entered the jQuery era! #unity #gamedev

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

Coding protip: if you aren't sure how a specific class or function should be used and can't find any guides, forum posts or blogs online, search GitHub for the name and filter by the appropriate language. This usually gives at least a few open source usage examples. #programming #coding

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

After nearly a decade of development, I am very excited to finally announce Desolus! Explore a city of Gothic architecture torn between past and future in Desolus, a first person puzzle game. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxfV...

submitted 22 days ago • 10 comments

A first look at grenades in Brickstrike! #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #indiegames

submitted 23 days ago • 3 comments

The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-deprofessionalization-is-bad-for-video-games

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

In 2023 I wrote a blog post about a protocol for signing and validating human written text. Today I saw yet another online thread about people wringing their hands about the inability to detect AI written text. This is a huge problem in education at the moment! helbl.ing/Written-Proo... #edtech #ai

submitted 24 days ago • 1 comment

It seems that the "magical game networking stack" that I blogged about a year ago now actually exists. The whole idea is to make networked multiplayer games as easy to make as split screen multiplayer games! Accomplished with tight integration with a custom DSL easel.games helbl.ing/The-Magical-...

submitted 25 days ago • 1 comment

Just started watching Foundation and it's obvious they didn't consult a professional mathematician for their bit on psychohistory. One of the main characters is supposed to be a prodigy mathematician too... If only I could finish my proofs by doing some random manipulations on floating holograms.

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

This weekend I'll be showing off Brickstrike as part of Somerville Open Studios! Then next week another demo night - Boston Indies Pre-PAX Demo Night at the MIT Open Space. I won't be going to PAX, but I will be going to some afterparties on Thursday and Friday. #gamedev #indiedev #indiegamedev

submitted 40 days ago • 0 comments

We’re one week away from Boston Gamedev Week, so we thought we’d make a thread to talk about everything we’ll have going on! Okay here we go 🧵 #gamedev #indiedev #indiegamedev

submitted 43 days ago • 1 comment

Hey bsky! We're Boston Game Dev, a community nonprofit supporting the local game development scene. We help groups big and small run meetups, jams, demo nights, lectures and more. Watch this space for more news about what we have coming up! #gamedev #indiedev #indiegamedev

submitted 78 days ago • 6 comments

Brickstrike and Extensional Software now have websites! We're indie game developers based in the Boston, MA area. www.brickstrike.com www.extensional.software More to come soon, including the Steam storefront and trailer. #gaming #gamedev #indiegames

submitted 73 days ago • 0 comments

git tip: when I'm working on a branch that has significantly diverged from main, I first merge main into the branch. This allows me to fix merge conflicts while allowing other people to update main. After testing, I then merge the branch into main. 95% of the time this results in a fast-forward

submitted 83 days ago • 1 comment

I have now opened alpha testing for my upcoming game Brickstrike. Think multiplayer Minecraft + Guns! If this sounds interesting to you, join the Discord. I am looking to gather footage for a trailer. discord.gg/2HsSdv4AFS #screenshotsaturday #indiegame #gamedev #game #videogame #indiedev

submitted 93 days ago • 1 comment

Smooth first-person aiming is something that I've had in Brickstrike for a while. My approach for many years was to keep a running average of the mouse delta from previous frames and apply that. This led to the aiming feeling "floaty" and imprecise. #gamedev #unity

submitted 95 days ago • 1 comment

Dependency injection via the inspector in Unity is pretty common, but it doesn't work if you have prefabs that need references to scene game objects. One pattern that I've been using to workaround this is a quasi-singleton strategy. #gamedev #unity

submitted 106 days ago • 1 comment

This coming week I will be in San Diego for the Workshop on Binary Analysis Research (BAR), presenting some work that I did for DARPA AMP! www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss2025/co-...

submitted 106 days ago • 0 comments

I've been using Linux extensively for work and some personal projects recently and I must say it has a long way to go to be usable by the average person. There's tons of instability around OS upgrades, firmware upgrades and hardware drivers.

submitted 129 days ago • 1 comment

Another successful demo night for Brickstrike! People seemed to really enjoy the game ❤️ The number one takeaway from tonight was to have an actual web presence, including a Steam page. All of that is coming soon, I'm still in the process of setting up an LLC and business bank account.

submitted 140 days ago • 0 comments

Tomorrow night I'll be demoing Brickstrike at Boston Indies Demo Night! The event is located at Aeronaut Brewing Company near Union Square. More info here! www.meetup.com/bostongamede...

submitted 142 days ago • 0 comments

Mapping ranges is something I do so often in game and graphics development that I often wonder why it isn't a standard library function. Lerp and inverse lerp are in the Unity math library, but map range, which is a generalization of both, is not! rosettacode.org/wiki/Map_range

submitted 145 days ago • 0 comments