Brought To You By
ANGELINA is put together using a hodgepodge of all sorts of tools, libraries and codebases. My thanks to all of the people behind the stuff below: your kindness in releasing your work for others to use made ANGELINA that much easier to create.
Software
I currently work in Java, using LibGDX and flixel-android. The flixel-android team have been hugely helpful and kind, offering lots of advice and code snippets. I really appreciate it, and highly recommend their library if you want to use LibGDX with a bit of extra structure!
Flixel is a game library for Flash that makes game creation an absolute joy. I want to also mention FlashPunk too, which I didn’t use mostly due to having previously had experience with Flixel. Find both libraries at Flash Game Dojo.
Work on the Flash platformers was further improved by the excellent Flixel Power Tools, which extend Flixel’s usefulness even further by adding all sorts of wrappers, convenience code and handy plugins to get more done in less code.
I am hugely indebted to Kevin Glass’ Slick game library as well as the underlying LWJGL library for the Java work. Kevin himself has also been really helpful on Twitter too. Slick will feature more prominently future work, I hope!
Early work was published using Monkey, a great little language that pops out HTML5 games.
SnakeYAML is used for later GARNET stuff that is still in development. I’ve found YAML so useful for readable data input.
People
ANGELINA also benefitted from a wealth of people who were willing to share ideas, time and knowledge with me.
Azalea Raad is the first and most important sounding board for any and all ideas I have relating to ANGELINA and beyond. If there is mathematical code in anything I do, chances are she sketched the code outline before I started typing. She’s also the main reason I latched onto Computer Science so well, and she continues to teach me stuff every day.
Lots of developers on Twitter who are always giving advice and feedback – Mike Treanor, Alan Hazelden, Guilherme Tows, Tom Coxon, Andrew Lim, Samir Talwar, and more.
Tristan Allwood was a general inspiration and help for the last five or six years, but lately taught me Git and Condor, two technologies which have helped not only make me feel a bit more grown up but also genuinely improved the amount of work I can get done. Tristan is responsible for overhauling the entire first-year teaching course at DoC since finishing his PhD; he’s an incredible guy.
The Computing Support Group at Imperial’s DoC are precisely all the best stereotypes about a CSG and none of the bad ones. They have contributed many hours of their time into helping me get ANGELINA’s uniquely quirky (read: atrocious) setup running smoothly, as well as myriad other miscellaneous tech help. They cannot be praised enough in my opinion.
Sam Geen and Mike Prescott are two people in particular who have followed and chatted about the project with me for many hours, long before I was even doing it officially. They make lots of contributions to the project, linking me to things, pruning ideas and offering alternatives. Thanks muchly to the both of them.
Thanks also to the many people willing to jaw about my work for hours on end, including great email exchanges with people like Tony Veale, Adam Smith, Aaron Isaksen, and a lot of forum discussion from the likes of many people who I only know through their screen names.
Of course, thanks also to my supervisor Simon Colton and the incredible group of researchers at the CCG. We are pretty cool people.
Apologies to anyone I’ve forgotten – I do my best to name you here because I benefit so often from great conversations and interesting people. Thanks to you all!