Adventures in Codeland

C++ is over! We of course revisit it later when we look at things like Unity, but that's besides the point. All in all this week was actually pretty low key. I did so much work on this thing leading up to this week that there really wasn't much to do. Most the week was spent fixing minor bugs, balancing, and playing flash games.

Until Thursday that is. Turns out the 3rd team member that was forcibly added to our team was unable to figure out his only job, and decided not to talk to us or the teacher about it, in favor of playing Minecraft all class every day. So thursday night I pounded out the inventory and potion system, as well as a method of recording your inventory upon saving and loading, all in about 4 hours. Then I realized the version of code I had at home was about a week out of date T_T

It took like 30 minutes to get it all working at school, then I handed it in, and voila, all of Friday Saturday and Sunday free of school commitments.


Next we move on to Technical Design, Business and Math. This is exciting since this is the stuff that interests me the most (except maybe the math...). However the way the school breaks up the course is just weird. Basically the short version is you go to afternoon classes for about 6 months, learn Tech Design, Business, Math, Flash and C++, then go to night classes. However they add in students at the start of every course except for C++. So the "right" order is the theoretical stuff THEN the coding stuff, whereas I was lucky enough to get a start date that's the other way around.

So, now I have 3 months or so of no coding whatsoever. So I intend to try and spend at least an hour a day working on my own project. I don't expect the work load for the next few months to be very heavy, and this way I can stay up to snuff and even get more familiar with the concepts I've already been introduced to. I plan to make a bit more expansive of an RPG. The biggest downside to the last one was I started it when I had a fairly limited understanding of C++, so the initial framework was utter garbage. That should not be an issue this time.

Now then. Here is the RPG Rpoject. Almost all of this is my work. The story and monster design is my partner's concept, though his writing is terrible so I did a lot of cleanup.

You should just have to open the .exe and the game will run (and also log your keys). It will not work on a non-windows OS. Also theres a good chance the text won't be properly formatted from the get go. What you will need to do is:

-In the window that pops up when you open the .exe, right click the title bar
-Select properties and navigate to the "layout" tab
-Set width to 90 and height to 30 under both "Screen Buffer Size" and "Window Size"
-Click OK
-Close the Window and re-open it
(alternatively, if you don't care about my awesome ascii title screen, just type 1 and press enter and start a new game, everything will be fine from there)

There hasn't really been much to say over the past 4 weeks. We've been doing tech design, which unforunately didn't end up being quite what I expected. I was imagining discussing the design behind making a good game, but that isn't exactly what we got.

The first few days we looked at the history of video games, which was interesting, but not exactly something that will be useful to know. Following that we looked at some of the technical aspects of what exactly is required in a game. Most of it was (to me at least) common sense, but stated in a way that you would never really think of. Hard to explain without going into exact detail. It was at least good to get a bit of a different perspective to look at things from.

Then we spent 3 or 4 days looking at every genre of game and analyzing it with from this new perspective, which was incredibly dry and intuitive.

Following that though we looked at how the documentation for games are done, and thats easily the biggest thing I got out of Tech Design. It's really cool to see how exactly these things are done, because I wouldn't have thought that it was done the way that it is.

We also looked at some business stuff, how the typical team is put together, company hierchy, different positions, how a game is actually put together and delievered to shelves and homes. Not the most useful stuff but mildly interesting.

Finally we had our final project. We basically had to conceptualize a game. We had a couple days to put together a pitch and present it to the class and teachers. Then by the end of the week we had to put together a full Game Design Document for it. A lot of work but fairly fun. Though some of the minute, finicky details really irked me. I also think that maybe my idea was a tad too big, since I felt like I needed a little bit more time to put everything together.

I put together my GDD in google docs, so you can view it here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fdvhl6B-fJ6WmkWrpjaTI03SrjHSonSEOd0utSaigK8/edit


Next we move on to two weeks of HTML5