Archived Blog: This is a Blog

This is the archive of my blog titled “This is a Blog”. It was hosted, I think for its entire duration, on plusminos.nl, which I don’t own anymore. In hindsight, it was mostly a place for me to collect my experiences with gamejams, and to periodically collect and publish links I had found interesting enough to tell other people about.

I think I cancelled the plusminos.nl domain name near the end of 2024 when I bought my current domain, https://bobrubbens.nl, with the goal of rebooting my personal blog there.

I did not come up with the URL plusminos.nl myself. It was actually an idea of Lukas, an old housemate of mine. I remember it took him only a fraction of a second to come up with the idea, when asked for a domain name somehow relating Zeus and and mathematics.

One of the more interesting yet accidental features of the blog is the relatively high number of tags, compared to the number of posts to be tagged. At the time I suspected the Nikola static site generator to use tags for more than just categorizing posts (e.g. SEO). I think that caused my habit of overzealous tagging.

There are still some things that I haven’t recovered/republished yet from my plusminos.nl site, such as the link collections linked below. My game design portfolio is also still missing (which I used to be quite proud of, even though it didn’t get me the internship I’d hoped for), as well as some smaller things (the ROLLI, and one or two smaller single purpose pages). I think I’ll get to them at some point. In the mean time the blog posts announcing the link dumps are available below for your perusal :-).

TODO: mention script?

Posts

“Ce n’est pas un jeu de pointer-et-cliquer” explained
Published: Saturday, April 28, 2018.

SPOILERS AHEAD! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK

While I've had positive comments on my game for Ludum Dare #41, I've also had confused comments. I like open endings and room to speculate, but I also think it's nice when things have a "definite" answer. In this post I will outline my thoughts and intentions behind the game such that those who need closure can get it. Read more…

An Algebra of Genres or: How I Discovered more Depth in the LD41 Theme
Published: Tuesday, April 24, 2018. Tagged: gamejam, ludumdare.

Disclaimer: this is just my opinion, and I'm not a philosopher nor a literature expert. I wrote this for amusement, and not (that much) for technical correctness.

I'm not sure how you experienced the beginning of Ludum Dare 41. For me, it wasn't a very smooth one. The theme didn't sit with me all that well. In fact, I was very much convinced that the theme was explicitly very one-dimensional. And with that I mean that most ideas that it gives you are not very original. That is, it wouldn't give me any ideas that I couldn't have on any other lazy saturday morning. Read more…

Interesting-link-o-rama!
Published: Wednesday, October 14, 2015.

At the beginning of this year I did a few "Interesting Link" round-ups. At some point I stopped doing the round-ups due to a lack of time. But I kept collecting the links in Google Keep. Today, I decided this was getting out of hand. I had to process all these interesting links! But how? What do you do when there are just too many interesting links? Read more…

LD32 Frantic Timelapse
Published: Friday, May 15, 2015. Tagged: timelapse, c++, ludum-dare.

Ludum Dare 32 post-mortem
Published: Tuesday, April 28, 2015. Tagged: gamejam, ludum-dare, gamedev.

Now that the madness has moved from the dev's programming caves, to the Ludum Dare voting pits, and finally out of the voting pits, everyone has had some time to evaluate his participation in Ludum Dare 32. And indeed, so have I. In this post I'll talk about some of the cool stuff, some of the less cool stuff, and an outlook on the next gamejam. Read on! Read more…

LD32 Pre-mortem
Published: Saturday, April 18, 2015. Tagged: ludum-dare, gamejam, weekend.

It's that time of the tri-month again: Ludum Dare is upon us! I managed to plan two complete days without responsibilities, so I'll be participating in the compo this weekend! Read more…

2 jams, 1 weekend
Published: Friday, April 03, 2015. Tagged: gamejam, gamedev, c++, timelapse.

Two weekends ago I did two gamejams in one weekend, and it was. Freaking. Awesome. What makes it even better is that I got two timelapses out of it, altough both in a very different context. In this post I'll shortly go over the first jam, and then do a post-mortem of the other jam. The post is kind of long, so if you just wanna see and play the good stuff, scroll on down! Read more…

Multiple backgrounds for multiple monitors
Published: Wednesday, March 11, 2015. Tagged: python, backgrounds, script, programming.

If you never used them you might disagree with me, but if you have you'll most certainly agree: multiple monitors are awesome. There are lots of upsides to multiple monitors, but one big downside: you can only set one background for all three monitors (note: this was sort of fixed in windows 8, but my post still applies if you want a custom solution). It is however perfectly possible to have a separate background for each of the monitors. In this post I'll talk about a script I wrote to compose backgrounds across multiple monitors, using Python, imagemagick, and some threading to speed it up a bit. Read more…

Interesting Links #3
Published: Tuesday, March 10, 2015. Tagged: interesting-links, links, link, gamedev, programming, reddit.

Pfew, that took a while! Didn't expect it to be some much work to plow through a few dozens of links. I kind of forgot that I actually have to read the links I save before I can put them on this list, so once I remembered that I got kind of stumped. But I read them all and cherry picked the most interesting ones. I want to especially want to highlight the OpenGL tutorials link. I plowed through them all and they really give a specific overview of the bare essentials you need to get started with current-date OpenGL. If anything, check out that link! Read more…

SympJam15 Post-mortem
Published: Saturday, February 21, 2015.

In this post I will talk about how a few friends of mine and I spontaneously organised a 24-hour gamejam and my experience during the jam. I will also showcase almost all four games completely. Read more…

std::end(gregorian[2014]);
Published: Tuesday, December 30, 2014. Tagged: new-year, old-year, 2014, 2015.

Well, here it is: the end of 2014! It has been a great year for me, with lots of awesome things that happened. I got a price for enccouragement for my results in the first year of my Computer Science bachelor. Also, probably obvious but I finished my first and started with my second year of my Computer Science bachelor, which is a realy cool feeling. Read more…

Ludum Dare 31 post-mortem
Published: Monday, December 15, 2014. Tagged: ludum, dare, ludum-dare, 31, ludum-dare-31, post-mortem, postmortem, gamejam, game-jam, sdl, c++, cpp, sdl2.

Last week I participated in Ludum Dare 31, and it was totally awesome! Now that the dust has settled and I’ve had time to clear my mind a bit, it’s time to look into the process of the actual Ludum Dare, and… Evaluate! Read more…

Figuring out std::move’s behaviour without internet access
Published: Sunday, November 30, 2014. Tagged: c++, programming, nuts-’n-bolts.

This weekend I had a problem with std::move() and std::unique_ptr. What I wanted to know was very simple: when you move a to b, does b get destroyed? Or is a simply moved to b, and b left dangling? What if the type of a and b has a std:unique_ptr member? My first thought was "Ofcourse the memory gets managed correctly, otherwise moving would be tedious and cumbersome and that's (probably) not what std::unique_ptr is meant to be.". That sounds logical, but I wasn't a 100% sure. Read more…

Interesting links #2
Published: Tuesday, November 25, 2014. Tagged: interesting-links, links, link, gamedev, programming, reddit.

Somewhat of a week and lots of internets later, here's another "Interesting links" post already. At first I was kind of worried since there seemed to appear no interesting links at the end of last week, but yesterday and today it took off again. I want to make one special mention this week: the Wait but why blog. Why? Well, if you're somehow finding my blog worthy of your time, Wait but why will definitely not disappoint. Read more…

Interesting links #1
Published: Tuesday, November 18, 2014. Tagged: interesting-links, links, link, gamedev, programming, reddit.

During my day-to-day life I browse reddit often. I frequent a few subreddits, namely r/gamedev, r/programming, and r/cpp. When the days get colder I also start frequenting r/nosleep again. Yup, nothing beats the feeling of being watched when you're home alone at 3 pm. I click on a lot of links but more often than not I'm more interested in the comments people have than the link itself. The links and discussions that I have found (very) worthy of time are listed below with a little explanation why the link is special. Because I frequent mostly computer science subreddits it's mostly compsci related, but if you're lucky you might find a scary story or two in there every once in a while. Read more…

#TAGJam16 postmortem
Published: Thursday, November 13, 2014. Tagged: sdl, jam, the-arbitrary-gamejam, nuts-’n-bolts, c++, gamedev.

Last weekend (7-9 november 2014) I participated in The Arbitrary Gamejam. I have participated in a few gamejams and completed #1GAM 2013, but I don't have any solid gamedev experience or success stories (altough there maybe are two #1GAM games I'm actually proud of). Needless to say this weekend wasn't a success story either. In this blog post I will discuss what went wrong, what went right, and what might happen next time I'll jam (hopefully the next Ludum Dare this december!). Read more…

Game of Life on the FPGA
Published: Wednesday, November 12, 2014. Tagged: fpga, pi, game-of-life, conway, module-5.

For my first post I will talk about the end project of my previous module. I'm studying Computer Sciences at the University of Twente, and our previous module was Computer Systems. Formally speaking we worked on it for about 6 weeks with a group of 4 students. However, informally speaking we mostly spent the last 2 weeks on it. Things weren't really clear enough to actually make something earlier. Read more…

Archived Blog: This is a Blog

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