Software Engineering Daily

Yacht Club Games is the studio behind the acclaimed Shovel Knight franchise. Their latest release is Mina the Hollower, which is a top-down action RPG inspired by classic Zelda and Castlevania titles. After many years in development, the game recently launched to widespread critical acclaim. David D'Angelo is a lead programmer at Yacht Club Games. In this episode, David joins Joe Nash to discuss the custom C++ engine built for Mina the Hollower, how the team approached Game Boy Color art constraints and audio in a modern rendering pipeline, the game's Castlevania-inspired combat philosophy, how the open world manages saving and collision without load screens, and more. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

Modern web development requires an ever-growing collection of tools including formatters, linters, bundlers, and plugins. Each tool typically has its own configuration, dependencies, and performance cost. As applications grow more complex, the overhead of maintaining this toolchain becomes a real burden. Biome is an open source toolchain for web projects that brings formatting and linting together in a single fast, opinionated tool. It’s built in Rust and is designed to be a drop-in replacement for Prettier and ESLint, with sensible defaults, minimal configuration, and consistent behavior across the CLI and editor environments. Biome also introduces a module graph that enables cross-file analysis, and type-aware lint rules that don’t require the TypeScript compiler. Emanuele Stoppa, known as Ema, is a Senior Systems Engineer at Cloudflare, a lead at Astro, and the creator and lead maintainer of Biome. In this episode, Ema joins Josh Goldberg to discuss the history of Biome, how linters and formatters work under the hood, what makes Biome’s architecture fundamentally different from the tools it replaces, and what’s coming next for the project and its community. Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

Multiplayer games are among the hardest software systems to build, requiring developers to synchronize state across unreliable networks while maintaining fairness, performance, and a responsive player experience. Latency, cheating, server costs, and debugging distributed game logic all introduce complexity that single-player games never encounter. Dome Keeper is a minimalist tower defense game with roguelike elements where players must protect a fragile glass dome from relentless waves of alien attackers. The game was developed with the Godot Engine and released in 2022. More recently, the development team embarked on the challenge of adding multiplayer to the game. René Habermann is the founder of Bippinbits and the creator of Dome Keeper. Chris Ridenour is the founder of KAR Games, which is Godot focused studio that developed Drift: Space Survival. Chris is now working with the Dome Keeper team to bring multiplayer to the game. René and Chris join the show to talk about the origins of Dome Keeper, developing the game, and the process of adding multiplayer to a Godot game. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com