Browsing Date Archive: 2006 September

Here’s a few indie developer blogs that I subscribe to:

• An Independent Game Developer’s Diary — One of the most interesting things about this blog is that it also describes the business side of things, such as deciding which business structure to use and basic accounting. 
• Cliffski’s Mumblings — The blog of Cliffski, the developer of Starship Tycoon, Democracy and Kudos. I definitely recommend checking out the Kudos Design Post-Mortem.
• The Dark Moon Blog — I first found out about this from reading a GameProducer article about “text-link-ads”, and it was nice to see a fellow developer earning some cash from the programme. Jochen recently quit his job to become a full-time indie developer, so wish him luck!
• GameProducer.net — Juuso’s blog on game development, which covers most of the areas involved in developing and producing games. Most people will find the indie sales stats of interest, especially those just starting out and wondering “how much can I make?” The site is regularly updated, and the archives have a lot of useful information stored within.

I promise not to write another list post for a while!

What is Blitz.ZipApi?

Blitz.ZipApi is a userlib and set of helper functions for BlitzPlus and Blitz3D that allow you to use ZIP functionality, such as compression and decompression of data. The helper functions take care of the most common operations, such as adding data (either from a file or a bank) to an archive or extracting a file.

Using Blitz.ZipApi, you can compress Blitz banks, read the contents of ZIP files and create your own archives.

For the latest updates to this project, please see the Blitz.ZipApi page.

License

ZlibWapi.dll is released under the zlib license. More information can be found at the Zlib homepage.

The userlib declarations and wrapper functions are free to use and modify without restriction. If you modify the code, please consider letting me know what was changed and why so it can be improved. If you do use this library in a project, I’d appreciate a mention but it isn’t required.

Quick Links

Donations & Support

If you find this library helpful in your projects, please consider donating. Donations of any size are always welcome!

This library has been tested, but some bugs may still be present. If you find any, please submit them to the bug tracker. I can’t promise they’ll be fixed right away, but I’ll do my best to sort out urgent problems.

If you have any comments, please feel free to leave them here. You can also send an email or leave them as a feature request on the bug tracker.

Download

It’s a none software development related post today. Hurrah!

Over the weekend, I created a new template for my brother’s blog, “The Collected Writings of James Newton“. I’m rather pleased with how it turned out, especially considering the fact that I’m not much of a designer.

It wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined it, but I think I got the overall “feel” of the site right, and that’s what matters. Creating a good atmosphere for a blog is important, and something I should probably take into account with my own blogs.

There are a few things about the design that I quite enjoyed:

• Wooden Background — My designs are usually quite clinical, and although it’s not real wood, I think it gives the design a more “organic” feel.
• Rich Footer — They’re all over the place, but I’ve never used one in a design before. Now I have. Grabbing random photos from TinyWebGallery was very simple, and they add colour to the site.
• Sidebar — It’s not too different from most sidebars, but I still like it. I like the highlighted images in the RSS and article links, and also the “About” section.

If you’re interested in video games, writing or a host of other things (including Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon), then hop on over.