Category: Games

I’m going to be making the greatest MMO game ever! It will be cross-genre, so people who like first-person shooters, real-time strategy games, and role-playing games will all enjoy it.

It will have an amazing story that spans many arcs, but it won’t be linear at all. The entire world will be highly reactive to how you play, just like a paper-and-pencil RPG.

It will also span time, so you can play from prehistoric times using rocks as weapons all the way up to the future where there will be lasers and mechs!

So here’s where you come in. I need someone to help me build this game. I need programmers, artists, musicians (a full orchestral score!), and writers. I can’t pay you since I am doing this for free, but once we get it out there, we can paid based on royalties. Or maybe a publisher might pick us up.

What do you think?

Anyway, thanks for your time. This is going to be so cool.
Perhaps we can discuss this in a private forum? I
remember trying to do something similar in QBasic.
I got pretty far, too, but then I stopped and
looked at it and thought that I could do better.

Fun and cool with cool ideas! Maybe the main character can have
ocular implants, so you can see in the dark or through walls?
Oops, I’m saying too much in public. I don’t want someone
looking here and stealing my ideas.
So long!

Awhile back, I gave myself a goal of trying to create a simple Tic-Tac-Toe game within a week. I didn’t want to just copy the ubiquitous code out of a book, though. I wanted to take a project from intial design to implementation on my own. This project was not meant to be something commercial quality, nor is it meant for public consumption. It was just a way for me to test my rusty programming skills as well as practice using some of the tools I was experimenting with before, such as Subversion.

I did it. I called it GBTTT_CLI, which stands for GBGames Tic-Tac-Toe Command Line Interface. No graphics. No sounds. Just a simple Tic-Tac-Toe game. You decide who goes first, and each player will select one of the spots to place his/her piece, either an X or an O. At the end, the game will tell you who has won. Simple. B-)

What Went Right:

1. It was not made with just one code file.

   Tic-Tac-Toe is a very simple game. It doesn’t need to be object-oriented, nor does it need much in the way of content. Still, I wanted to separate elements, such as Players and the Board. For the most part I succeeded. I could replace the Player with an AIPlayer at a later time easily. I could probably change the implementation of the TicTacToe game class so it can be done over a network without changing much of the other code, if any.

2. Development went along fairly quickly.

   GBTTT_CLI was the first project I have worked on while using a safety net. Revision control tools are amazing and I wish I would have known about them years ago. I used Subversion, and while I rarely needed to backtrack, especially in a small project like this one, it was useful to go through my log to see what changes I made before. There was also a time when I made a LOT of changes only to get nowhere with them. It was easy to revert all the code back to the way it was before the changes were made. It saved a LOT of time for me when I could have otherwise just been trying to make changes to get back to a stable state. With a single command, I was there.

   Another thing that helped was the ease I had with actually coding. I underestimated my coding abilities because I thought I was starting from scratch with C++. The truth was, I could program, and I just needed to learn C++’s syntax correctly. There were a few things that I got tripped up on, such as NULL instead of null as in Java, but a quick look at my reference material showed me where I was going wrong.

3. The game got completed.

   It was a project that I was able to finish. It may not be much, but it is more than what I had before, and I am proud of that fact. It’s also shows that I have the ability to work on my own designs.

What Went Wrong:

1. It took me too long to get here.

   My goal was to get this program done in a week, and in total programming time, I did way better than that. Unfortunately if you count the days from when I first posed this goal to myself until I finished it, it was way longer. When I started coding, I got a lot done within a few hours. Then nothing for days until I tried to work with it again. Then I got some strange error. Nothing for weeks. Then finally I finished it. So I had a few hour spurts of productivity followed by long periods of nothing. To be fair, it was not like I was just avoiding the project. I had other responsibilities in my life, such as homework. But to be brutally honest, I wasn’t making the time for this project either.

2. I overdesigned the classes.

   It is Tic-Tac-Toe. How do you overdesign it? I did. I thought that if I created the classes first, they would be useful as tools to build the actual game. I still think that it would be good to design the project this way, but my problem was in designing in specific features. The Player class has a Record member. The Record class holds the Win/Lose/Tie records of that Player. I wrote the classes in this way because I originally envisioned a single game session letting you play multiple rounds. In the end, I decided not to implement that since it did not need to be done to accomplish my goals. So now a Round is useless in the project. I didn’t spend too much time making it, but there are other elements that were made but not used. For instance, I also thought this would be a great way to learn network programming, so I tried to anticipate it by making Boards unique. I could have saved time and effort by deciding to add such things later or in a new project.

3. The code is ugly.

   When I originally programmed in QBasic, I had no concept of code structure and variable naming. When I learned C++, I thought it made sense to follow what C++ did: variable and function names would look_like_this. Then I learned Java. Java programming practices are clean looking. A class name looks like: ClassName. A variable looks like: variableName. When I went back to C++, I got it in my head that I probably should keep it looking like C++, where standard library naming conventions have the underscores as mentioned above. That is when I started the project.

   Then I found a C++ coding convention guideline. Apparently Java-like style has its place in C++, too. Well, I did not want to go back and rename everything, so when I continued to work on the game, I kept using the same style rather than confuse everything, me included. The end result is commented, cleanly separated, but somewhat hard to read. A sample:
   
// switch to next player
game.next_player();
// keep asking for input until value is legal
int move = player_current->get_move(board);
bool is_legal_move;
is_legal_move = board.isLegal(move);


   Huh. Well as you can see, I did not succeed in keeping the style uniform. Board::isLegal() should be changed to Board::is_legal() to accomplish that. Still, it’s hard to read because of the style.

I know there is normally 5 of each in a postmortem, but come on, it’s Tic-Tac-Toe!

What I Learned

1. Practicing programming is important. I should treat it as such and make the time for it rather than hoping I have an opening in my schedule. There won’t be one if I leave it up to everything else.
2. Iterative programming is useful because I can avoid overdesigning something that won’t get used
3. Programming is still fun, just like I remember it.

Even though I am disappointed in how some things turned out, I am satisfied. It’s a completed project! I was originally going to leave it in a state of incompleteness and start working on a more attractive project idea, but I decided to be “great” rather than “good enough”. If I keep that attitude with these smaller projects, it will be a good habit to have when I tackle larger ones.

I think I will post the code at a later time. I originally did not think it would be something I would publish, but I figure it has to help someone besides me. I’ll need to add a proper README and installation/compilation instructions first.

EDIT: Hey, I delivered. B-) And in two forms:
gbttt.tar.gz
gbttt.zip