Adventures in Codeland

So I spent the day getting my partner's code to integrate with my own. Unfortunately his stuff is not done the best, so I had to do some work to spruce it up, and more importantly, not break everything else.

All in all it was a very interesting look at the process though. Seeing not only someone else's take on the game outline, but also how they went about implementing it in code, is all really interesting. The approach taken and the comments are literally like looking inside the person's brain.

Hopefully the teacher can tell how awesome I am through the mediocre growth that is level 2. (the boss level is level 3 now).

For anyone curious, this is what it all looks like after being put together, and this is what I'm handing in.

So nearing the end of week 2 of C++ (albeit this week is a short week)

Needless to say it's a very different beast from Flash. It's much less shareable, much less visual and much less forgiving. I'm honestly liking it a lot better though. It was nice having something so direct to show for the effort in flash, but by the end I really got the feeling that I was just jumping through hoops to get it to do what I wanted, but C++ gives so much more control, and I really feel like it being less forgiving actually makes me be that much better.

Anyways, last week was mostly an introduction - learning the things we already knew in a new syntax. However everything was approached with a huge focus on the proper way to do everything in terms of conventions, efficiency etc. There was also more of a focus on what exactly certain things mean to the computer. Towards the end of the week we started to get into some more advanced things such as enumerators, switches, multi-dimentional arrays, and some of the nifty things you can do combining these things and some of C++'s built in classes.

THIS week things are getting real, and probably marks the first concepts that are actually 100% new to me. We've started to take a look at vectors, pointers, references, iterators and so on. The concept of storing the address of a piece of data and the difference between using that and the actual bit of data confused the heck out of me at first (especially when combined with an iterator), but I think I got the gist of it now. I'm actually really happy with how C++ is going so far. I have memories of highschool computer science and certain advanced facets of C++ just completely confusing me, but so far I've had no problem whatsoever understanding those things I had problems with back then, and then some.

The way C++ is being handled is a little different than flash, just because C++ is twice as long. Instead of being marked entirely on a single big project, there are a bunch of little projects, and one big project at the end. The little projects have been pretty simple so far. They are supposed to be like a 2-4 day thing, but both the ones so far I've been able to finish in a couple hours. The first one was actually really interesting because it seemed really simple, but there was a really sneaky little bit of logic that was a bit of a tripping point. I figured it out just fine, but then I got to watch every single person in the class scratch their heads trying to figure it out, at one point or another.

Anyways, we've also been informed that our final for C++ will be a simple RPG. The guidelines are pretty loose, the only real requirement is that there has to be an inventory and a winning/losing condition. It also has to be coded using all the appropriate methods and such, but that's mostly agiven. So I'm in the process of trying to work out in my head what is realistic to think I can try and do. Though it's honestly kind of hard to say, considering there is more than a month's worth of classes between then and now, so who knows what I'll learn that will open up new doors, or just make certain things easier to do.

Zhal, if you dont mind me asking, which school are you attending? Is it online courses or is it your typical go and sit in a classroom type environment?

The school I'm attending is called triOs College. I believe it's only got branches in Ontario. Classes involve 4 hours of in-class instruction monday-friday plus homework, though for my particular course homework seems somewhat light, and is mostly relegated to whatever projects happen to come up. Although apparently there is going to be a proper written test in 2 weeks.

You should submit this to newgrounds. It was fun, Inuknuk failed too hard though.

Been a full, and interesting, week and a half or so, for a few reasons. What we've been learning is starting to get pretty deep. That's not all though.

So last week we started off by looking at some more in-depth uses of classes and pointers, as well as how they play together with functions. From there we started looking at some new concepts to do with classes. First we looked at composition/aggregation, which is basically just defining a class which belongs to another class (like an item that belongs to a player, or some such). From there we went on to inheritance, which is where you have a base class, then one or more classes which use that class as a base. So perhaps you have a Goblin class, and then a Hobgoblin class which would inherit the Goblin's properties. We also learned how to overload constructors, which sounds way more awesome than it is.

After that we looked at a concept that is pretty interesting to me. We learned to overload operators, or in layman's terms, tell the program how to compare objects that it doesn't know how to compare. So for example, comparing 5 to 4 is pretty easy. 5 > 4 will evaluate to true without a second thought. But what if you were comparing apple to orange? The computer has no idea what to do if you ask it if apple > orange, but you can tell it how to compare them. So a basic example is just defining a way for the program to look specifically at variables help within the class, so it would basically become a comparison of if apple.tastyness > orange.tastyness.

That was last week. This week we started off by looking at virtual functions, which is a way of guiding inherited classes so that it knows the proper form of a function to use. We also looked at friend functions, which are global functions that have exclusive access to the private members of the class they are defined within. If nothing else there were many jokes to be had... I won't say any more.

The most recent topic is a bit mind-boggling. We've been looking at dynamic memory allocation/deallocation. Basically forcing the computer to store data on either the stack or the heap, and managing if and how that information is accessed. It's amazingly easy to accidentally delete a stack reference to a heap variable, and then you have the oft-feared memory leak. We had an example in-class of a simple console that started at consuming 412kb of ram, and went up to 1.5 gigs of ram without actually doing anything more than it originally did. Crazy stuff.

As far as other stuff, there are some interesting project coming up. I probably mentioned that we are slowly working on a small scale RPG that is due in april. That's been really interesting to me. Very little of the coding is actually done yet since the planning is kind of integral. Making RPGs has always been my dream though, and so having a legitimate excuse to spend lots of time designing everything, even if only on a small scale, is really fun to me. There is about a half hour before class every day that I have spent discussing the project with my partner.

On top of that, we have march break coming up. Which for you crazy Americans: March break is basically a week where some places are out, but mostly just schools. Unfortunately I don't actually get it off, but we basically just need to do something, devised by ourselves or the teacher, that will amount to approximately 20 hours of work over that week. So the entire class has decided that we would pool our efforts and try and put together a game for our collective portfolios. This thing is entirely out own idea and over the break we get in the middle of the class, we've been having discussions as to what we want to do and gradually fine tuning the concept. At this point I can't honestly say what the final product will end up like, but it's really interesting to be a part of a legitimate game design process. It's amazing how much work can go into even a small project before you even look at a computer.

Between the march break game and the RPG things have been really busy, but I'm loving how absolutely immersed it has made me feel in the process of actually making games, even if they are at best, fodder for the portfolio.

So March Break is over and our flash project is "done". It was an interesting experience that didn't pan out quite as much as we had hoped. A big part of it was just that we didn't get quite as many man hours as we had hoped. We were originally hoping for about 20 hours from 7 people. In the end 2 of them never showed up, one guy basically just googled a few sound files, 2 guys spent most of their time working on redundant things... That left one guy doing art and me doing the coding.

I'm glad we did it though. I didn't really learn much of anything programming wise, but I definitely feel like I learned a lot about the process of coordinating work between several people and how not to make a game. In the end we only got maybe 50 man hours instead of the 140 we were working for, but I'm pretty happy with the project we ended up with. It's buggy and doesn't really do justice to our original concept, but it ain't half bad.

You can find it embedded here:
http://ramblingofagamer.blogspot.ca/2012/03/march-break-flash-project.html
and the .swf is attached.

Very Nice! Keep up the wonderful work! I've done a lot of work in flash which was only scratching the surface so I have a good Idea of the immesne amount of work that goes into what you are working on. It's great!