Fixing a Unity Build that Won’t Run due to a Broken app.info

Here’s an odd little tidbit I ran into while trying to run a Unity build I got from a student. When I tried to run a Windows build of their Unity project, the game would almost immediately end. I would see the executable show up briefly in the Task Manager but it would quickly disappear […]

How to Increase UE4 ShaderCompileWorker Priority from the Command-Line

While waiting for shaders to compile while I was packaging a build for an Unreal Engine 4 project, I started poking around in Task Manager and noticed that ShaderCompileWorker.exe, the helper program UE4 spawns to compile shaders, had low processor priority. A bit frustrated with how long the shader compilation was taking, I right-clicked on […]

Lessons Learned from It’s Raining Bombs

Participating in One Game a Month (#1GAM) is possibly the best and worst idea I’ve ever had. On one hand, quickly producing games prototypes is a great way to learn and try out ideas. On the other hand, launching a game every month is HARD. Still, I’m glad Skyboy Games is doing it. (Ask me […]

Crushing Every PNG in a Folder Hierarchy with a Batch File

While writing a batch file to remove stray Thumb.db files from my Ookibloks data, I figured it would be a good time to do a little extra content optimization. If, like Ookibloks, you happen to use PNG for your game’s textures, you may have a lot to gain by way of the PNG compression strategy […]

Easily Create a Windows App Icon with Gimp

Icons and how they appear in your target OS are the sort of thing you don’t think much about until you actually have to make them. This was definitely the case for me after I prepped a build of Ookibloks and noticed that the icon was blurry. Looking more closely at how icons behave on […]

Recursively Erasing Thumbs.db from your Game Resources

Despite our best efforts, Thumbs.db (a hidden file that Windows uses to store Explorer thumbnails for all the images in a folder) often manages to sneak its way into game data folders. At least, that has been the case for me while putting together build scripts for Ookibloks. Before potentially releasing a build with one […]

Run a Windows Batch File from the Current Directory

Here’s a little bit of Windows batch file magic that I never remember off the top of my head so I’ll log it here. When you want your batch file commands to be executed from the current directory, putting the following at the start of your batch file should do the trick: cd /d %~dp0