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Comment by munchbunny | Hacker News Reader

I would have killed to have tools like Unity when I got into game programming. All of my hobby time was eaten up trying to wrangle OpenGL and C++ and crappy open source engines, and cobbling together a shitty physics engine, so I never got around to the actual game part. When I went back years later to prototype ideas in Unity, it was a breath of fresh air.

However, in my struggles to get off the ground, I did learn a lot more about font rendering than I ever wanted to, and it has come up unexpectedly useful.

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> I would have killed to have tools like Unity when I got into game programming. All of my hobby time was eaten up trying to wrangle OpenGL and C++ and crappy open source engines, and cobbling together a shitty physics engine, so I never got around to the actual game part.

I'm still in that boat, and I am an 8 YoE "Software Engineer". I recently got into boardgame.io library (also made by a Googler, coincidentally) and it is a fantastic library.

I've attempted to make min-max CLI board game simulations before but failed. Also tried (still somewhat active) to make a 2D artillery game and got close, but just kept getting bogged down in framework (actually migrating from framework to framework) and other chores. Currently it uses LibGDX.

With this boardgame lib I just wrote game logic. It was fun, for a change! Plus it has multiplayer and integrates with React really well for a UI so it's actually useful.

I just wanted the CLI boardgame sims to find the best moves/races in games I play IRL. With this I can actually have other people play and maybe show it off at some point.

Wait, you can’t leave us hanging about how font rendering was unexpectedly useful. What kind of fonts did you deal with later in life and why?

It's not that exciting of a story. ;)

I had to write my own font rendering code for lack of much in the way of general purpose libraries for doing it in 3-D engines back around 2005. Your options were, more or less, to pay through the nose for Scaleform, to roll your own, or to use something really ugly. So I had to learn some basic typography to tie Freetype into a text rendering engine, which got me practical experience with editing font files, anti-aliasing, hinting, kerning, processing digraphs, Unicode, the works.

Web 2.0 started more or less right after that, so interest in digital typography in general exploded. I ended up working on some applications of text layout in non-left-to-right and pictograph languages for 2D canvas, SVG, and web based image manipulation in general. So out of sheer coincidence my hobby work messing with OpenGL/Freetype was suddenly directly relevant.

pretty exciting to me. lots of interesting projects. thanks for sharing.

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