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Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: March 19th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 60.75 (current year) = 323 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 5 (current year) = 621 / 1000

I spent a little over 10 hours on development this week, which is decent compared to previous weeks and considering that I did not put in development time for about half of the week due to all sorts of events. I managed to clean the existing code, fixing a few bugs in the process. I had to get functionality into separate functions so that the menu system would have simple function calls to make to do anything of importance. For instance, if I want to let the player restart a fresh game, I would prefer to call reinitializeGame() than to wrangle all of the appropriate variables. It also helps during development to simply be able to hit the ‘R’ key and have the game call that function. Restarting the game without restarting the application just makes testing that much faster.

My menu system has a stack of Menu objects. If there is a Menu in the stack, then the game is essentially paused and updates are passed through the Menu. Right now, I can pause and resume the game using the PauseMenu object. I can’t actually display choices or let the player pick among them, but I imagine it won’t be too much work to use the existing InputSystem to allow the player to choose among the selections. The menus I create for this game won’t be very general-purpose at all and will likely need to hard-code the choices, but since this project doesn’t need anything incredibly general-purpose, it will be fine.