Erlang: Writing a Tetris clone Part 3 – Gameplay rules, final features and deployment

The third video in this series moves on with implementation of gameplay rules, scoring, the “next” preview window and packaging and deploying the game using ZX as a shortcut. Writing this is a lot of fun. As of this video the game part is finished, but there are a few things such as high score […]

Erlang: Writing a Tetris clone Part 2 – Gameplay mechanics

Last night I was able to make the second video in my series about implementing a Tetris clone in Erlang. Yay! In this video I start where I left off in the first video where I had ended with a data abstraction to represent the play field (called the “well” in Tetris lingo), a data […]

Erlang: Writing a Tetris clone Part 1 – Data types and basic GUI display

Over the last few days I wrote an Erlang implementation of the classic puzzle game Tetris and decided to do a few videos to explain how it works and why. This is part one of a three-part series. Data types and basic GUI display [this page] Gameplay mechanics Gameplay rules, final features, and deployment This […]

Getting started in DayZ Standalone v1.07

Happy free weekend! DayZ is be free to play from 2020-05-21 to 2020-05-25. What better way to spend your weekend while a pandemic sweeps the world than playing a post-apocalyptic zombie survival simulator… bwahahahahaha! (Note: This is not a paid article and I have no connection to Bohemia Interactive — I just really like this […]

Erlang: Minesweeper

I’ve been sick the last two days and utterly uninspired to do anything productive. I’ve instead procrastinated by writing a “minesweeper” clone in Erlang. Why? I have no idea. I was just sort of thinking of simple desktop classics to mess around with that are de-facto standard to populate a GUI app launcher like Vapor… […]

You don’t have time to play games

There is only one way to develop graduate-level expertise in more than one narrow specialty: self education. The time commitment required is larger than most people are willing to consider — so large that the people who tend to apply themselves to the degree required don’t notice they are doing it.

The basic Erlang service ⇒ worker pattern

There has been some talk about identifying “Erlang design patterns” or “functional design patterns”. The reason this sort of talk rarely gets very far is because generally speaking “design patterns” is a phrase that means “things you have to do all the time that your language provides both no primitives to represent, and no easy […]

Why OTP? Why “pure” and not “raw” Erlang?

I’ve been working on my little instructional project for the last few days and today finally got around to putting a very minimal, but working, chat system into the ErlMUD “scaffolding” code. (The commit with original comment is here. Note the date. By the time this post makes its way into Google things will probably […]