Tom
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thope.xyz
Tom
@thope.xyz
82 followers 280 following 120 posts
Game programmer specialising in engine and tools 🔧. Based in Dundee, Scotland.

📆 Available For Hire!

Working on an arcady, drifty, driving game, title TBC. Follow for updates ⭐️
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thope.xyz
Probably destroyed by compression but I was working on a rotate gizmo today #gamedev
November 8, 2025 at 10:58 PM
thope.xyz
Rocks #gamedev #indiedev
October 16, 2025 at 12:34 AM
thope.xyz
On Wednesdays I pay my debts #foss #premake
A merged GitHub PR for the Premake build tool Description: When following the instructions Building Premake on an Apple Silicon Mac the build fails due to the default architecture being x86. This PR updates the documentation to inform Apple Silicon users to set PLATFORM when building, and adds a check to Bootstrap.sh which should detect Apple Silicon hardware and set PLATFORM automatically if not explicitly set by the user.
October 1, 2025 at 6:59 PM
thope.xyz
Today in my continued effort to NOT implement the Pacejka magic formula, I made some neat little AnimationCurves which I can sample instead :) #gamedev #indiedev
September 30, 2025 at 7:05 PM
thope.xyz
Working on gizmos again #gamedev #indiedev
September 18, 2025 at 12:53 PM
thope.xyz
I did a Lua implementation of a CLAY style UI layout system a few months ago. Today I ported most of the layout code to C++

Tbh I was really liking the lua version. Wish I had a bigger love2d project that warranted investing more time in it #gamedev
On the left, some C++ UI layout code. On the right is the layout rendered as coloured boxes.
September 5, 2025 at 10:52 PM
thope.xyz
Dithered shadows + bsky compression makes it hard to tell in the video but trust me this is much improved
September 3, 2025 at 5:49 PM
thope.xyz
Half a day later and I found the bug in my maths library that was causing the flickering shadow maps 🫠
I probably deserved it... #gamedev #indiedev #indiegame
September 3, 2025 at 5:46 PM
thope.xyz
I think I figured out what my game is #gamedev #indiedev
September 2, 2025 at 5:44 PM
thope.xyz
Came home and added some simple linear fog after a long weekend with the fam. I've been working on some stuff in the background to support infinite worlds for the new direction I'm going in. #gamedev #indiedev #indiegame
September 2, 2025 at 12:06 AM
thope.xyz
ayyy, lets gooo #blender
Screenshot of a PR I made being merged into Blender. The title is 'IO: Add Apply Transforms option to obj exporter'
August 15, 2025 at 1:43 PM
thope.xyz
cactus
#gamedev #indiedev
August 13, 2025 at 9:56 PM
thope.xyz
new editor feature : spawning items from the right click context menu #gamedev #indiedev
August 11, 2025 at 10:14 PM
thope.xyz
Packaging is now down with `./premake package`, and uploading to @itch.io with `./premake publish`.

Feels good 😎
A terminal showing a file being uploaded to itch.io with butler A screenshot of the itch.io website backend showing a successfully uploaded Mac app
June 28, 2025 at 10:42 AM
thope.xyz
Got packaging and notarizing Mac builds working from the command line with notarytool. Honestly this is much better than the old way with altool #gamedev #indiedev #solodev
A git diff of a bash script showing the change from using altool to upload Mac apps for notarisation, to notarytool. The new script is much shorter: xcrun notarytool submit --team-id ${TEAM_ID} --apple-id ${UNAME} --password ${PASS} --verbose --wait --timeout 5m ${APP_NAME}.zip
June 28, 2025 at 10:42 AM
thope.xyz
Feeling sick, but enjoying this in bed
A book. ‘The Making of Prince of Persia Journals 1985-1993’
June 27, 2025 at 9:36 AM
thope.xyz
Tried improving my GLSL workflow in sublime text with syntax highlighting + linting. Unfortunately the linting package needs a PR merged and glslangValidator.exe's --glsl-version flag appears to be broken... Still better than nothing #opengl
June 26, 2025 at 3:31 PM
thope.xyz
I think I'm close to having enough gameplay to make a demo for the car game but feeling a bit stuck 😖

Instead I fixed up some maths code and debugged lighting in this old FPS test scene. Worth doing I guess #gamedev #indiedev
June 23, 2025 at 4:33 PM
thope.xyz
Nitrous drifting baybeee lets goooo #gamedev #indiedev
June 20, 2025 at 11:55 PM
thope.xyz
Had another playtest today and did some editor polishing. Feeling like I need to touch grass rn though... #gamedev #indiedev
June 19, 2025 at 4:34 PM
thope.xyz
Working on the level editor
#gamedev #indiedev
June 18, 2025 at 5:25 PM
thope.xyz
Added shadow maps while stuck at the airport today. I didn't love the softness produced by PCF. This is dithered PCF with some distortion applied to the sampling which I prefer but still not 100%, opinions welcome. Also need to fix the swimming while the camera is moving #gamedev #indiedev
June 17, 2025 at 11:30 PM
thope.xyz
Added braking this morning, which is apparently a thing people want #gamedev #indiedev #screenshotsaturday
June 14, 2025 at 8:54 AM
thope.xyz
Fixed some physics bugs, improved the constraint solving to account for mass, and exposed more values for tweaking. Got more feedback today, getting closer to a driving model I'm happy with... #gamedev #indiedev
June 13, 2025 at 5:06 PM
thope.xyz
Started on entity *browsing* and *editing* tools today. The code might end up strange because I don't have entities in the ECS sense (not necessary for this case) but trying to not overthink 😬

A friend offered to design some tracks, but they can't do that without tools! #gamedev #indiedev
June 12, 2025 at 8:20 PM