For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 189 / 1000
Game Ideas: 432 / 1000
Target: 735
While I didn’t work very much, I did start a new project. I am calling it SDL Pong, although it will make use of Kyra. I am going to make a very simple, very specific Pong clone. I am not going to allow myself to overengineer it or to try to create an engine that could make more than what this project needs. I am trying to see what I can use from my existing projects, which should help even more, but the most important thing is that I am working on a known project, so from beginning to end, I should have a good idea of what to do.
I will write more about the project this week.
3 replies on “Thousander Club Update: September 25th”
Way to go! That is what i’m talking about. When done you may, end up having code that can go to start building a wrapper/library — When you’re done with that try something more challenging. One thing I think you can do, without resorting to over-engineering anything is after your pong game you can think about a feature to add to a wrapper and build a game around it. But don’t design the wrapper, do the game and then based on what you built the game around add it to the wrapper. For instance, with pong you’ll have some sort of movement code… something along the nature of x = x + velocity; Now you can start on an entity system, the only thing it will consist of is a position, and said velocity. You copy the code from the game to the wrapper. Now so you think of something that will challenge you a bit (this may be easy for you, but just for example)… An animation system, you don’t build an animation system, however you think of how your next game could have sprite animations. So you build say… a sokoban clone (i’m not saying you should do any of this, i’m just giving an example)… you have a little guy that pushes stuff around and this little guy has frames of animation. So you have a current frame, and a frame rate, and the image data… So the next time in your wrapper you add the animation code from your sokoban clone, and so on…
I think you’ll find that finishing games will be just as rewarding as having the correct framework, if not more so.
Keith
Thanks, Keith!
Kyra already has an animation system, and I plan to continue to use Kyra for the forseeable future. However, you are correct about being able to abstract features once I have implemented them. My problem originally was that I was trying to be really abstract with the engine I was writing. Maybe it could have worked out, but with my lack of experience, it would require a lot more time than I have to give. With already implemented features, it is a lot easier to write an abstraction. For instance, I have something to test against, whereas if I start with an abstraction, I don’t know if what I am doing will work until I am finished.
Exactly, I tend to do that alot as well. Only I think I bug people online more… and then end up spinning my wheels. I haven’t finished a game for 3 or 4 years because of this. However that is going to change real soon. Starcatcher is almost at the point of where i can quickly get it to first prototype stage. Which means you should be able to play it as a game maybe in a week or so. (Depends though, it might not be for another month yet, but that’s just because of the way I work). And this mobile game that got ported to the pc, assuming the pc version finds a publisher will be finished in a few months I believe.
Keith