https://blog.apicici.com/posts/ Recent content in Posts on Assorted cables and wires Hugo -- gohugo.io en-ca Sun, 05 Apr 2026 09:23:00 -0400 https://blog.apicici.com/posts/2026/04/dynamically-loading-steamworks/ Sun, 05 Apr 2026 09:23:00 -0400 https://blog.apicici.com/posts/2026/04/dynamically-loading-steamworks/ The game I’m currently working on uses the Steamworks SDK to integrate with the Steam client and do nice things such as achievements and cloud saves. I made my own custom engine for the game, and my initial approach for integrating the SDK was to simply link to the shared library and ship it as part of the game. The game itself is DRM-free, and this approach allowed it to work without the Steam client installed, by making sure that if SteamAPI_Init fails (e. https://blog.apicici.com/posts/2024/05/savegames/ Thu, 16 May 2024 16:16:20 -0400 https://blog.apicici.com/posts/2024/05/savegames/ Savegames. I avoided them with the first three Ines games with the (barely defendable) excuse that they are short enough to be ok without them. Our latest point & click adventure game The founders of [redacted], however, is long enough that we needed to put together a puzzle dependency chart to keep track of things. I knew from the beginning that this time I would have to finally allow saving. https://blog.apicici.com/posts/2024/05/smooth_pixel_perfect_parallax/ Wed, 08 May 2024 19:27:15 -0400 https://blog.apicici.com/posts/2024/05/smooth_pixel_perfect_parallax/ Introduction The latest entry in my series of adventure games (currently in progress) is the first to have long backgrounds with scrolling and parallax. The game (with the exception of the cursor) is all pixel-perfect—everything is drawn on a 240x135 framebuffer, which is then upscaled to fit the game window. As anyone who has tried to do pixel-perfect scrolling likely knows, moving layers at different speeds generally leads to choppy animations unless the speeds are carefully tuned (see below for an example). https://blog.apicici.com/posts/2023/08/game_translations/ Wed, 16 Aug 2023 18:34:32 -0400 https://blog.apicici.com/posts/2023/08/game_translations/ Introduction I’m currently in the process of translating my latest game, so I decided to write about the system I’m using to make things simpler for myself. I’m doing this for two reasons: It may be helpful to someone else I came up with this system last year and I had forgotten all the details and had to figure them out by looking at my parser code. I’d rather not have to do this again next year! https://blog.apicici.com/posts/2023/04/using-sdl2-to-mount-an-archive-from-the-android-apk-assets-with-physicsfs/ Sun, 30 Apr 2023 14:12:14 -0400 https://blog.apicici.com/posts/2023/04/using-sdl2-to-mount-an-archive-from-the-android-apk-assets-with-physicsfs/ Introduction The C++ game engine that I’ve been working on stores game data in a custom binary archive that I mount using PhysicsFS in order to access individual files. On the desktop version of the engine the archive lives in the same folder as the executable, and it can be easily mounted by using PHYSFS_getBaseDir to find its path. The Android port of the engine, on the other hand, stores the data archive in the APK assets, which cannot be accessed directly by PhysicsFS. https://blog.apicici.com/posts/2023/04/macos_builds_ci_cd/ Sun, 30 Apr 2023 07:43:45 -0400 https://blog.apicici.com/posts/2023/04/macos_builds_ci_cd/ Introduction I’ve been making a C++ game engine from scratch in the past few months, and one of the first things I worked on after getting the basics working was making sure that the engine compiled and worked on all the platforms that I’m planning on supporting. Building the macos version has been particularly difficult because I don’t have a mac, and unlike everything else I’m targeting I can’t just cross compile from Linux.