Category: Personal Development

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 227.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 500 / 1000

Target: 903

A little less than 100 hours left for the year!

I spent another week researching Autotools, and I managed to get two text-based applications building with it. One was a basic “Hello, World!” application, and another was a text-based board game simulation that I completed months ago. Now, I am trying to get the Kyra Sprite Engine building into a shared library. Previous versions already had a working autotools build system in place, but it has been broken for the last few iterations. Ideally I could get it back to a working state. At the very least, I would like to be able to use Autotools on my project while integrating Kyra into that build procedure.

Of course, November is almost over, and a month ago I said I wanted to be able to complete a Space Invaders clone. Researching and using Autotools is only tangentially related to that goal. Of course, goals can be changed, and I think that sticking with learning a new skill would work better than taking a break to make a game, which in all likelihood would take longer than I think it would.

So my plans change again, only I don’t feel too bad about it. Sure, it means putting off finishing another game, possibly until the beginning of 2007, but it also means that I am not trying to spread my focus across five different disciplines at once. I am still moving forward, and learning a new skill always feels as though you are not being productive at first.

Realistically, with the holidays approaching, I can see my time getting split up between the day job, game development, and family, which means that Space Invaders might really take me a couple of months to make anyway. But hey, once it is made, I should be able to easily build and distribute it.

Oh, and I also spent a number of days coming up with some really simple ideas. I plan to catch up to 1,000 ideas by the end of the Thousander Club for this year. Last week I was at 445 ideas, and now I am up to 500. If I spend a few more weeks coming up with hundreds of ideas, I should be able to make it. It has been a long time since I posted one of them, and I hope to post one for this week.

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 218.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 445 / 1000

Target: 882

I have printed out the manual for Autoconf, which is the tool used to create configuration scripts for a wide-variety of Unix-like systems. Together with Automake, it will allow me to make packages that users will simply need to configure && make && make install. So far, it doesn’t seem like it is too complicated, but it is difficult to find beginner documents that don’t assume you already know something. Interestingly, the Autotools book claims to be a tutorial, but it seems to give examples without explaining much, expecting you to use the reference manuals for the individual tools.

I intend to write my own set of tutorials since I think these tools would be much more useful to developers if they only knew how to use them.

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 204.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 435 / 1000

Target: 798

I managed to add a few more ideas to my list, but I spent the week either working long hours at my day job or catching up on other responsibilities. I did not get too much time to work on game development. I am fine with this fact, but I need to do a better job of scheduling these down times. As it is, it has been about a month since I first started working on Pong, and I don’t want to have another month go by before I am ready to release it as truly finished.

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 203.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 432 / 1000

Target: 777

I hit 200 hours as of Wednesday morning, which puts me at over 20% of the way towards 1,000 hours!

In the article But Can You Make Pong?, it listed a set of components and features to make a Pong clone. I don’t have a win condition, so the game goes on forever or until you hit ESC or Q to exit the game. I don’t do any fancy work with the graphics or sound. I only used keyboard input, and it is hardcoded to the up and down arrow keys as well as the A and Z keys (although I did provide a configuration file that should be easy to edit to make it work for other keys). The physics are also simple, which means that the ball simply reflects as it hits an object. If it hits a paddle, it reverses the x-component of its direction vector. If it hits a wall, it reverses the y-component. It makes for some interesting bugs if the ball hits the top or bottom of a paddle, though. The scores are prominently at the top, and since the game simply starts and doesn’t end, there is not much of a UI to speak of. There is no computer AI, so you must play both paddles.

Still, even without all of these cool features, Pong is finished. I can add some of these features, or I can move on to a second project. There is the temptation to polish up a Pong clone, to “do it right”, but I think I can always take what I learned, apply it to a second project, and come up with newer features there. I’ll likely write more about this next project this week, but it might just be Asteroids or Space Invaders.

As suggested last week, I am also going to see if I can get this Pong clone submitted as a good example project for people learning how to work with the Kyra Sprite Engine. I will spend some time this week cleaning up the code just for this purpose.