Weekly update #2 11/7/11

So I guess this is a little late if we were to call this a 'weekly' update, but what the heck, better late than never.

So what have I been up to this week?

I've made a lot of progress in developing a brand for my game studio, I've got a catchy name which I've registered a domain for (it's a full .com), I'm now developing a site to represent the brand and showcase the work that will hopefully be up there at some point.

R&D is another area that I have made lots of progress on, I've been trying out a few APIs I might consider using for my upcoming titles, I installed GLUT and messed around with OpenGL, while an OpenGL-based C++ game or game engine isn't in my short term strategy, I feel it's important to look to the future and start learning something a little more hardcore, which I will use in the future if I manage to get some simpler titles to market.

I think something has to be addressed, I am aware that I'm using a lot more business terminology, referring to my games as products or brands, I do this for a reason, and not the one you might think.

When you refer to something as a product or as a brand, you expect it to carry a price, this is not entirely the case in my situation, while I would like to become a successful independent game developer, who is able to earn at least a windfall from the occasional game, that is only a secondary goal, my primary goal is to improve my skillset and create some games for everyone to play.

The point I'm trying to get across is that while I would like to make a living from game programming, my initial goal is not to make millions of pounds, but a more humble goal of getting a game 'out there' and testing the water, by applying the rigour of business, I'm able to motivate myself better, as I work as if I am working to order, as opposed to freelance without a clear direction.

Anyway, enough of that, I just wanted to explain what I do and why I do it, I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts of the day.

Mike

It's time to get serious 3rd Jul 2011

Today I've decided to start to formalise my development process by documenting what I'm doing [relating to game development or my other projects] on any given day, therefore I'm going to be posting a lot of blogs from now on. the posts will mainly be check lists of tasks I hope to achieve on that given day, or at least partially work on, I've decided to get serious because I want to set something up with some longevity and make some great titles for the platforms I'm choosing to develop for.

Here is my first list (drafted at 1:30am last night :P)

- Need name for Game Studio (Therefore will consider some options today)

- Need to decide flagship/target platforms (can't program anything till I know what I'm programming for)

-Need to do some R&D, into 3D Graphics, 3D Math, User Interface design and Web Design

- Decide genre/general game mechanics/concept of debut game

- Finish Portfolio Page

- Begin designing pages relating to my game projects

- Look back a past uni work relating to business/ project management.

I'm hoping if I keep this up, I can measure my goals and hopefully come out with something worth playing, thanks for reading.

Mike

UPDATE!

What I got done

-- came up with a few names for the company

-- came up with a draft strategy for how I'm going to roll out various games out on different platforms (therefore I decided my flagship platforms)

-- looked at some OpenGL/GLUT tutorials, once I get my windows 7 machine up and running, I'll start practicing, but read a few guides today and archived them.

So I have a few more things to do, but hope to finish them on the nights after work.

Getting things clear in my head: Game Design

Today I decided to do some design work, I find one of my biggest problems is getting a complex design clear in my head, and usually this leads to ambiguity, thus poor implementation, this kinda annoys me, because my ability to design must be far greater (or at least equal to) my programming skills if I want to advance to bigger projects.

So I sat down and asked myself "what is a game?", the following is a UML diagram that I wrote out, some of the notation might be a little wrong, but you'll probably understand where I'm coming from. (Hopefully the image will be enlargeable)

The above diagram is what I consider to be a game, I'm going to keep adding to this model, and eventually I may be able to build an engine out of it, one of my flaws is definitely design, sometimes I can't see wood from the trees!

Let's see what you make of it.

Progress log, something different.

Throughout the rest of this relatively short day, I'm going to save up all of my progress updates, and add it to this blog, rather than constantly post on Facebook, lets see if this work, if it does, I'll do the same in the future :-)

15:47 - After hours of scribbling on my whiteboard and sipping tea, I've come up with a revised class design for generic "game", I needed to tweak and change a few things as my old design was suited to SDL (I had to write a lot of functions to cater for SDL's shortcomings), that means I have less coding to do, but at the same time, cannot use the SFML Classes out of the box because many things aren't included, currently been working out how to structure sprites, players and objects in a game, figuring out what SFML did and didn't do was probably the biggest challenge

16:32 - Started writing out the code for my take on a sprite class (an extension of the one SFML provides), the new one handles collision, and collision regions, most of the methods relating to collision are implemented , code compiles, but haven't tested the methods work yet, about to do that.

16:51 The collision works!

Note in the pictures, when the 2 rectangles collide, the are visible, when they aren't colliding, they disappear

17:22 A Slight hitch there, the region collision didn't work to start off, but I figured it out, I found out I was making the width and height of the regions the same size as the original shape, thus negating the effect of setting a region in the first place! it's fixed now and everything working fine

This post is getting a bit long, so that's enough for now, I've probably waffled on for too long now :P

Next Week I'm getting Edjukated! & Birthdays!

I've decided that I'm being too complacent at the moment, I'm supposed to be developing lots of games/apps and building my website this summer, but much of my time is spent fretting over my main project, the GUI library (oh god, don't make me think about it again!)

This project is becoming the greatest regret of my programming pursuits, although I do want to finish it eventually, it's taking up way too much of my time, and since it's essentially a collection of code, with little tangible evidence of progress, I'm getting only small bursts of motivation from this project.

The website on the other hand is taking shape, I've started to get the hang of using the GIMP, and now I'm able to make what you might class as 'Art', but I guess we'll see how good it is when I eventually launch that.

But I detract from the primary purpose of this blog, and this is to talk about learning, over the next week, I will dedicate the majority of my time to learning some new languages/APIs/software, I need to break out of this cycle of complacency (a la, using SDL, and only the basic tools of GIMP, over and over again), therefore, my mission this week will be to read a book on JavaScript, look into the Multimedia Library 'SFML' and learn some more advanced features of the Image tool 'GIMP'.

Hopefully, by acquiring a new skill set, I will be able to make better quality things, more quickly, so that I can pass them on to you.

Oh, it's my birthday next week, turning 19 isn't exactly a big deal though, it's not like I'm legally allowed to do anything new, just another year older/wiser :P

Peace.

I guess I should keep everyone updated, I've been up to some stuff :D

So this is a rather informal blog, at least in contrast to the last 'write up' style blog, this one is just going to go over the stuff I've been doing during my holidays.

For about a fortnight, I worked on my GUI library, it's really taking shape! I have events implemented in a way that I'm really happy about (the interface between user and GUI is clean and easy to program), I've also implemented visibility and the ability to associate other controls with forms (the controls can even be forms! so you can embed them inside other forms!)

One major challenge I'm facing is how I'm going to implement text, for labels and captions etc, I can either use the SDL_TTF library or create my own bitmap fonts, neither option seems that great, but I'm not sure what other options I have, we'll see...

The second project I started on was working on the website, at the beginning of the week designing assets for the website (logo, navbar image etc) seemed like an impossible task, however, when I started to use the image editing software (I use GIMP), things got easier, and dare I say it, fun!

I've already made the logo and navbar and I'm going to keep tweaking them as I go along, I'm going to spend the entire week working on the website, then I'll flip back to the programming, A productive holiday indeed!.

As for just general life stuff, I'm ok, I keep waking up way too late, not getting to sleep till 2/3 in the morning, but apart from that it's all good, I'm kinda cool with just getting on with my stuff without interruption, It's kinda funny, I'm not even ashamed that I'm isolated, I kinda like it, taking a break from my social life seems like such a natural thing, and will make going back to uni all the more rewarding when it happens.

I hope you enjoyed my blog :-)

ProgrammerInProgress

my p0ng haz > brainz thn urs!!!11!!!1222!! : A brief write up and update

If you can't speak noob, then what I mean't to say was "I have completed writing a pong game in SDL, here is my writeup!"

I decided, to start off my summer holidays to re-acquaint myself with C++ and SDL by writing a simple pong game, this now complete pong game (dubbed pong 2010) is simply a no-frills, back to basics pong game (white ball, white paddles, 7-segment display for scores).

I wanted to get back into the swing of things, so I set about making the game straight away, design documentation was pretty light, and things started off well, until I realised that my initial design just wouldn't cut it when I tried to introduce an AI player.

Originally, my design was simple, all objects in the game were independent of each other, and they interact by returning SDL_Rects via accessor methods, and I just checked if the boxes were colliding, sounds like it would work fine doesn't it? well it did, until I realised I wouldn't be able to write player AI very easily, because the Player class has to know certain details about the ball (such as the location, size and proximity to the player), my first design had no chance of Player AI working without a tonne of bugs.

Rather than restarting the project, I opened up my UML diagram tool, entered in everything I already had into a set of class diagrams, and started to move things around, fortunately I was able to find a decent design that meant I could use much of the existing code I wrote, whilst still being able to allow for the new functionality the game required.

The new design was fairly simple, the Player stores a reference (in this case, a pointer) to the ball as a more primitive superclass (called Rectangle, the paddles and the balls are derived from this class), and the 'Player' class became a super class for the 'HumanPlayer' and 'AIPlayer' subclasses.

This new design allowed me to move player input into the HumanPlayer class and out of the main body, and allowed me to move AI into the AIPlayer class, this made things a lot clearer, and aided me in completing the project.

I also added a nifty feature I picked up in A-Level computing, a 7 segment display, (you know, those displays you probably have on a digital watch or alarm clock you own, I used one for the score system), after an hours programming or so, I was able to finish a class called 'Counter', which was able to display the digits '0' to '9' anywhere on the screen, since the display is simply made up of rectangles, I was able to implement scaling, so now the display can be scaled for the needs of any game that requires a specific-sized counter (I may do a 14-segment display in the future to display the alphabet, but that's a little harder, as it requires diagonal shapes, I'll have to work out how to make those look right when I implement scaling)

That is the basic overview of my pong game, I learnt how to implement AI, which was fun (I've implemented very dumb AI in the past, the player in my pong game is at least a little challenging, but beatable all the same), and I feel like I'm back into the swing of things, after a year of ad-hoc programming due to my studies.


Aside from pong, I have been thinking about other projects to work on, one which I'm actively working on is my website, I really want to launch a new website before the end of summer, but I am going to take my time, and I will only release it when I'm happy with it, I want to do some things that will hopefully be really interesting!

I have a few other ideas in the pipeline, which I'll do if I feel daring enough! I also have the GUI library to work on, progress on that is slow at best, since I haven't really looked at it for a while, it's all about getting that crucial design correct, I tell myself that if I don't attempt to complete it, I am only stifling myself, because I need some GUI components for my various games and apps I have planned, which I cannot complete without getting this finished.


I hope this was an enjoyable read, hopefully I will be able to do videos when I get my new equipment and I have access to some fast broadband.

Thanks for reading

ProgrammerInProgress