Opinion has been raised that, although Duality sure is a great framework, it’s website representation on my blog lacked a professional look and feel. Unfortunately, this was absolutely true: The Duality info page was an ugly wall of text with loads of unnecessary information, bad design and far too many links. Although I was kind of aware of this fact, it somehow slipped my attention repeatedly until now. I finally found the time to rework the info page, and along with that switch to a different theme for this blog.

So.. in case you’ve always wanted to tell someone about Duality – now would likely be the most visually appealing opportunity since 2011.

So you might have heard of this development trick called Unit Testing – most likely in the context of some business application or software engineering talk, but probably not related to games. It’s something that large, bulky projects have, with a ton of different programmers working on the same stuff, but it doesn’t make sense to do something like this yourself, right?

Since Unity2D was released a little time ago, some people have been asking what makes Duality better for 2D games than Unity. While it is obvious that, in this comparison, Duality gets to be the little guy next to a giant, this may still be a question worth exploring. So, why does Duality exist? Here are some of my own thoughts on this matter.

I’m still figuring out how many hats a single guy can wear at once. So far, my personal hat count is something around “four”, counting two jobs, studying and personal life. As it turns out, I appear to have reached a limit for now. When this semesters courses began in October, the free amount of time at my disposal once again vanished, and so did the unsteady stream of content for this blog. This is just a faint sign of life, but hey – at least I’ve got some pictures.

The first one is a screenshot from job #2, where I’m developing a game that will be used in a medical context. It’s called MATE and aims at motivating young patients in doing their physical exercise using a training device – which is basically used as a custom game controller. It has one degree of freedom and the target audience is not what you’d call a “gamer”, so I’m keeping the game itself small and simple: You’re maneuvering a paper plane through a dynamically generated landscape, collect gold coins and try not to hit anything. There also is a highscore at the end of each level and a set of ghost players from previous records.

So there recently was this game development conference called “Respawn” and some of the guys from BatCat Games were there, giving Duality a nice guest appearance while talking about their experience developing the game “Honourbound”. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend myself, but according to what they’re telling me, it seems that it was received pretty well.

Needless to say, I’m pretty grateful for their kind support. Dragging Duality into the spotlight of a professional stage is something I couldn’t have done myself and it feels like a great reward for all the effort I’ve been pouring into the project in the last months. Thanks! 🙂

As for their project, there’s some more information available by now, in case you’re wondering what’s behind that fancy name: