Welcome!

Hey, I'm Skylar, a kid aspiring to become a competent programmer. This blog is here to detail my dabbles in development.

My dream is to one day become a professional programmer and do some game development in my spare time.

Thanks for visiting my blog, and I hope you'll come back!

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Framework == Done????

Yep... it is DONE. I just got done going through and making sure many things get output to a file, especially if there is an error. I've talked about making a GUI portion, and perhaps a bitmap font engine, but for the time being, I just want to be done with the whole thing. I've been getting behind on my homework lately, so I want to put in a big effort on that, and get all caught up on it.


So hopefully I'll start on some type of game, and perhaps finish it, before I go back to school.

Well that's the small update, later...

Audio Manager = done!

Well after a few days, it's finally done. Sorry it took so long, I've been pretty lazy.


So basically here's how it works: There's two abstractions CMusic and CSound (Mix_Music and Mix_Chunk).

Sound holds a channel, and volume, and music just holds volume (other than the actual piece of audio, that is).

You can call methods from them, which in-turn, call methods from the AudioManager. The AudioManager acts as a 'messenger' between SDL_mixer and the two abstractions. It performs checks on the various data of the abstractions, and then calls the appropriate SDL_mixer method.

It works great as of now, but I may add more later.

So now there's one last thing I will definitely get finished, and that is the Debug 'Manager'. I just want it to have functions to print to file and the screen. It will have it's own CText object to use TTF to print to screen. I also want to create some way to bound text to a rectangle, so that I can specify a specific rectangle, and the text will automatically be formatted to fit in the rectangle.

So after that, I'll definitely be having a code cleanup, and I'll implement Debugging code in many places (I have it set up already, I just gotta add the method call).

After that, I will decide to make a bitmap font engine and/or a GUI portion. At the moment, I'm really hesitant for the bitmap font engine, but slightly enthusiastic about the GUI 'module'.

Well I'm going to stop talking now, and hit the sack... Night Guys...

Secret Project Already Gone With The Wind =(

So the 'secret project' was a bot for the game Conquer Online. My friend had it working, and a lot of it worked quite well. I guess they released something that shut it down though, and my friend doesn't want to continue with it. More time for me I guess.


I was gone most of the day, so I didn't get anything done, but I'm starting to debate on whether I should actually make a bmp font engine, I might skip it for now, and make the audio manager, and then come back and make it, who knows.

But I already got a small start on a 'GUI' portion to the framework, but I'm not planning on finishing that until after I finish and sync up everything else.

The next two days are going to be quite hectic for me, so I don't know if I'll be doing anything. I want to get a good start on the homework I have though.

Well that's all for now, Peace, and Merry Christmas !

New Video Series?

Well I actually did get started making those SDL Tutorials. I've made two of them, but one of the two is split into two parts. Today, there was a lot of people bugging me to do different things, and I didn't get any work done on the Framework. I'm leaving soon, so I don't feel comfortable with starting to work on it now. The rest of the week, I'll be pretty busy, so I'm not sure how much work I'll get done, but here's my plan:


By the end of this week, have the audio manager done, with chunk and music abstractions
By Thursday/Friday of NEXT week, have all my text stuff implemented
Then use that last weekend to implement some debugging stuff and tie up loose ends, and make sure everything works fine together.

Then:

*The Game of Life (Estimated Time = 4 Days)
*Entropy(Estimated Time = 3 Days)
*Breakout(Estimated Time = 10 Days)

Then I'm not really sure what I'll do...

New Video

Well I finished kind of cleaning up my code, and made a 10 minute long video... with my own audio commentary =D.


Well I just wanted to announce that. I'm going to change one quick thing in the framework before I go to bed, and tomorrow I'll get started on the Audio Manager.

In the video, I think I said that I may do some SDL tutorials... So I'll see how I feel about that tomorrow, and maybe start making them.

Here's a link: Link

Enjoy.

2 Updates in One Day???

Yeah that's right!


Well I fixed the image loading stuff.

So the problem was that I was getting an Access Violation error... That's what kind of happens when you forget to initialize an object! I overlooked it so easily, because it was late at night when it happened, and I thought I just declared the object, didn't think I declared a pointer to the object.

Anyways, after I fixed that, the program would execute, but the image wouldn't show up. 5 minutes of a quick debug set up later and I find that the Video Mode wasn't set, which didn't make sense to me at that exact moment, considering the video was made. Then I found I accidentally commented out my initializing method.

After uncommenting that, it ran fine.

So next things to do, which I hope to finish tonight:

*Add Direct Pixel Manipulation of Surfaces
*Add Method(s) to select an icon for the window

Tomorrow is going to be a clean up day for my code. I'm going to throw everything into a namespace, and then go through and fix up some places in my code. There's places where things seem done, but they aren't really done.

Basically it's just things where I might have:

bool OnInit(), and then when I call it, I don't do anything if it returns false.

I'll also be going through and commenting a lot of the code.

So Monday, I will start working on the Audio Manager, and hopefully get that done within 2-3 days. Then I'll spend some time 'studying' SDL_TTF and perhaps making my own bitmap font engine.

Then I'll throw together a DebugManager, which will utilize the 'font manager' (not really sure about how I'm going to handle it yet....). Then it will be all done.

After that, the only changes I'll be making are optimizations. When it's done, I'm jumping right back into developing games. Starting with the Game of Life and Entropy, then I'm thinking about making a Tetris game, and a Breakout game, although, I think I might skip Tetris and go straight to Breakout. After that, I'm thinking of making a platformer =p.

Well that's all for now... I should (hopefully) have an update tomorrow. But if I do, I'll make sure it's after I do some cleanup.

So expect a video some time in the coming week showing off the current functionality of the framework.

New Update (Finals are OVER!)

Well Finals are over =D. I got As on all my finals, and have a 4.3 GPA for the semester, so I'm in good shape. Anyways, back to the actual development stuff.


So I made myself a check list of things I want done before I make a video. I've started on it, and have already completed half of it.

Right now, the current issue at hand, is my surface abstraction. I made an example real quick to test image loading/clipping. Everything compiles and links just fine, but when I execute it, I get an Access Violation error whenever it comes to the abstracted surface in the code.

So I have a LoadImage method in my abstracted surface class:

void LoadImage(std::string filename)
{
if(m_pSurface != NULL)
{
delete m_pSurface;
m_pSurface = NULL;
}

SDL_Surface* loadedImage;
SDL_Surface* optimizedImage;

//I don't feel like typing the rest, but basically
//I load the image into loaded image, and if it isn't NULL, then I format the image,
//Then I assign the value of optimizedImage (which is now loaded and formatted)
//To m_pSurface(which is the abstracted surface).


Anyways, right here: if(m_pSurface != NULL), is where it happens... I take that out, and it has an access violation the next time I mention m_pSurface.

I'll find the problem today hopefully. But after that, my checklist is:

*Extend functionality of surface abstraction to allow direct pixel manipulation
*Add support to select an icon for the window
*Place everything in a namespace
*Clean up and comments

so after I do everything, I'm going to go through, and organize things a bit better, and get things ready. I also haven't been consistent with comments, so I'm going to comment it as I'm reorganizing things.

But as it is now, to make anything, all I will have to do is:

Create a derived class from CApplicationManager (or use the basic one I made, which will just be used for simple demos) and then make my own set of states.

Well that's it for now, I'll make another post if I get anything done

Update for the Day

Well today I didn't get a lot done in terms of productivity, but I did test some features with small little demos.


I also added some important methods to the Window Manager class to update the screen, fill the screen with a certain color, and fill a rect.

The demos were just simple things to make sure the new methods worked, and to make sure window managing worked.

I also encountered a fail of the day in one of them...

I wrote up a quick demo using the framework that created a block where the mouse cursor was, and moved where ever the mouse moved (so it acted as a secondary cursor I suppose...). Anyways, when I first ran it, it was just a blank blue screen (I cleared the screen blue), and I kept wondering what the problem was. After about 20 minutes of searching through my event handling code... I found that I had set the block's color to blue, same as the background color.

Well, I checked to make sure all my event handling stuff works:

*Key Presses
*Key Releases
*Mouse Presses
*Mouse Releases
*Mouse Movement
*Focus Loss
*Window Resizing (Including Fullscreen support)

It seems like I'm missing some, but that's just off the top of my head...

But with that, I bid you ado.

Real Quick Update

Just wanted to say that I finally took care of all those errors, and the project now compiles fine, with just a single warning (just a little tidbit about losing data, because I convert from a double to an int) =D. Anyways, the event handling works well.


Tomorrow I have finals the next three days, so I probably won't work too much on the framework.

What I need to do, is study the structure of both SDL_mixer and SDL_ttf, because those are the last two things I want to implement.

After I do that, I'm going to make a much better Debug class, so that you can debug to the screen.

So just off the top of my head for the text stuff, I want to be able to do the following:

*Specify a Rectangle that text keeps itself in (not sure how possible this is... I'm sure there must be a way though)

* Select font, color, and string of text

* Find some way to manage fonts (Maybe not though...)


So that's just a few things that I want... Simplistic, but it's just off the top of my head. I'll be taking a lot of notes on SDL_mixer and SDL_ttf from Focus On SDL, LazyFoo's tutorials, and their respective documents.

Well that's the update. I definitely should finish this over this break that's coming up =D

446 Errors 0.o???

Will after I completed my Event Manager class, and a state machine, I attempted to compile the project, to make sure everything worked right. Well, I come to find out, that there are 446 errors and 30 warnings in the project, I think that's a new record of some sort =D!


Anyways, I've been slowly, but surely, cranking away at the errors and have now reduced it to 20 errors. Problem is, the 20 errors are all from the same thing, and quite frankly, I haven't figured out the problem. my Application Manager doesn't know that my Event Manager exists, and vice versa. Every other class can use both of these fine and vice versa. I've included the header file declaring the class, and checked to make sure the class ended with a semicolon. So I'm going to have to walk through the structure of the Window Manager and the Event Manager and the Application Manager to see how the Window Manager differs....

I'll try to work on that today, but for now, I must leave, school calls =/.

Attempting to Keep Updates...

So I finished my event handling scheme. Works just how I like it. Towards the end, I decided to screw Joystick/Controller support, so I have the methods commented out, so I can easily finish adding support later, should I so choose.


Looking at my framework, there was something that bothered me. To initialize subsystems of the framework, you call an 'OnInit' function, that takes in a number of flags, for each piece you want to initialize. I'm not really enjoying this, and I'm really considering pulling that out, and adding an init function for each subsystem within the app manager. This way, I can have more control over how each piece is created.

The thing I'm disliking more and more though. Is having to use the AppMgr to access anything else. But thinking about that... That's the whole point of the AppMgr, to have a unified 'front' to access everything. I'm just lazy and don't want to type alot... so #define will be a good friend =p.

#define WndwMgr CApplicationManager::Instance()->GetWindowManager()

The joys of #defines...

Anyways... So now that I'm done talking about what I'm doing next, let's talk a little bit about what I just did.

So basically, there were 3 new classes I wrote: Base Game State, Game State Machine, and Event Handler. The Event Handler polls for events, and every time there is an event, the event is dispatched to the AppMgr which determines whether it is an event that the Window Manager or state machine needs, and then dispatches it to the correct manager. The Window manager has functions to handle each type of event, such as resizes and focus loss.

The State Machine utilizes the Base Game State ( duh!). The Base Game State class has virtual functions for mouse/keyboard events. If your Game State will use it, then override the virtual function, if not, no harm done.

Well, that's pretty much the Event Manager...

So after I do some clean up to make sure everything works together so far, I'm going to finish planning out the Audio Manager, which will be the last piece (Besides Threading, Networking, and OpenGL support, but I'm not planning on adding any of those until I get my new computer).

I planned out the Audio Manager once before, but I'll have to modify it a little bit due to recent changes.

Now that I've said the Audio Manager is the last thing, I've realized I don't have text support yet =0.

I'm still contemplating on whether I want a full out text system (ttf/bitmap font support, specialized surface abstraction, and functions made specifically for it)

or just extend support on the abstracted surface I already have...

Either way, I should finish this framework over the break... and hopefully those two games.

Anyways, finals are almost here, if I get an 86 on my history final, I'll have a 4.3 GPA, yay...

Depending on how I feel over the break, I'm thinking about releasing some SDL video tutorials... The only SDL Video tutorial I know of is from some guy with a strange accent (no offense) snasebrase on Youtube, I believe...

Anyways I'm done rambling, it's time for bed, happy devving.

What's Up with the Inconsistent Updates 0.o???

Well I apologize for the lack of updates. School work tends to take over my life, whether I choose to do it or not 0.o. But anyways, I think my last post should be completely disregarded... As I started using that 'template' I found it was real dirty, and had a lot of bugs =/. So I've been working on a new framework... One that is so much better. As I'm typing this, it seems I've said this a lot, but I'm making sure everything works and everything is clean as I go along. I've spent a lot of time planning it out, and studying various methods to get things to work. But anyways, I guess I'll share a little bit to how it works/will work.

So far I have written 3 classes to abstract SDL_Surfaces, SDL_Colors, and SDL_Rects. I have also written a point class, Timer Class, and derived a class from the Timer Class to act as a timer specifically to manage the frame rate of the game. Aside from those 6 classes, I have 3 other classes that are 'managers'. I have set up a hierarchy in which the Application Manager holds everything, and everything is accessed through it. So far I have the Application Manager, a Window Manager, and a 'Debug' Manager (Exists only in Debug Build). As of now the Debug manager is very simplistic, and isn't my main focus. But anyways back to how this all works.

The Application Manager is a singleton, and abstracts the game loop, so in my main function, all I need is:

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
AppMgr->OnInit();
return AppMgr->OnLoop();
}

This greatly simplifies what goes in the main function. But the Window Function has 5 pieces of data: Screen Width, Screen Height, Screen Bits Per Pixel, the Title of the Window, and an SDL_Surface* which is the screen itself. The Window Manager has a constructor to initialize everything, Rendering functions - I have a few overloaded versions of it, so you can specify a lot, or very little, and an 'OnEvent' function. I don't have Events coded in well yet, but that is my task for tonight. I have grouped all the event types into two categories: Input or Window.

So the Event Manager will have an SDL_Event, and will check for an event, on an input event, the event manager will dispatch it, along with information specific to that type of event, to the current state of the Application Manager (which also need to be coded...). If it's an event that affects the window (SDL_ACTIVEEVENT, SDL_VIDEORESIZE, or SDL_VIDEOEXPOSE), I will dispatch the event information to the window to handle accordingly.

This is where my last framework failed, and why I need something as the Application Manager to hold everything.

Using SDL_PollEvent() pushes the event out of the queue, and stuffs your event structure with the information regarding that event. My problem, was that I would do:

while(SDL_PollEvent(&event))
{
if(event.type == SDL_QUIT)
{
SetState(Quit);
}
}

This was a horrible way to handle it, because I had this going on in a global state, yet any event handling was done in the current state (I derived my state manager class from Programming Game AI by Example. Has a Global State, Current State, and Previous State). So anything that was controlled via events, wouldn't function.

Through this, I have one thing controlling everything and taking care of it. Then in the current state, it will pass the event information to any entity that may need it.

Each manager contained within the AppMgr, also has a pointer (named parent) back to it's application. The idea is that none of the minor managers should exist without the parent AppMgr. As of now I don't have anything to restrict creating any of those objects, but I'm not sure how necessary it is as of right now.

But anyways, here's what I have left: Game States, Game State Machine, SDL_mixer functionality (unless this is already OO, which I hear it is), then add some stuff to my Surface abstraction for text loading via SDL_TTF and perhaps a bitmap font engine.

After this, I want to make 2 games to 'test' the functionality of this framework.

The first one is John Conway's The Game of Life. The idea looks quite simple, so I think it'd be a great thing to wrap up quickly.

The other one has no name, it was just something I sort of thought of. I don't want to waste time explaining it right now, because it isn't very important.



So that's what is going on at the moment, but for any of you that are interested, here's what's happened in between my last post and this one.

As I started to work on my new framework, I found two people that wanted to attempt a group project, so I said I'd join in. We decided to use SDL, with OpenGL rendering. I come to find out that my crappy integrated chipset graphics (boo hoo =( ), apparantly doesn't support OpenGL, so every OpenGL app I attempt to run will crash =/.

Well, I have been saving up for a new computer, but it's going quite slowly, but Christmas, and my birthday are right around the corner, and I'm estimating the computer will cost about $600 including OS. I'm building the computer so I can get a better price. Going with Quad Core AMD, and a mediocre ATI GPU, and Windows 7. So I'm guessing around February/March, I'll have a new computer and can extend the framework to work with OpenGL, and then, if the other guys still want to, we can work on a group project.

But, I say this is good, considering none of us are too 'fluent' in OpenGL, and one of the guys needs to learn C++, SDL, and OpenGL... He knows C, and has been programming with PAlib for a long time, so it may take him a while to get familiar with this stuff, but I'm quite sure he has talent.

Anyways that's all that has really been happening. Finals next week, so I've been studying a lot, trying to cram as much information as I can. I have 5 /6 of my finals will be really easy for me: Chemistry, Math Analysis, Spanish 3, English, and Music History... my US history class is the only Final I'm worried about. I have a habit of not remembering anything important when it comes to history.

But after Finals, I have (2 weeks?) off, and I hope to get a lot done during that time. One goal I'm hoping to accomplish is to grab a headset and make a video or two. I'm hoping I can finish the framework and the two games I want to make within that time, so I can make a video on it, and put some commentary in it... I don't know about you, but I'm much more intrigued into Videos relating to Game Development when I can hear the person's voice.

Well that's the end of this long post... I gotta get to coding that Event Manager!

Been a While Since I've Had a Post...

Well, thought I'd just write up a quick post, since I haven't had a post in a while. So Charge is still in no working condition, sadly, but I am finding more time to work on it. I've made a software engineering club at school, so I'm helping out a lot of new programmers work with C++, although we might be 'converting' to C#, since their ambitions seem to be within XBox games.

So I have been dabbling around in C#, and I have to admit, it's a great language. So far I've only made simple console apps, but I've made some pretty cool stuff. I created a simple local server/client chat app... Can't really be used to chat with others, just with the computer. But the cool thing about it, is that it converts the strings you type in, into packets (byte arrays) and then encrypts the packet, and decrypts it when it gets to the other side. So it's a little interesting =p.

So let's get back to the actual game development going on. I'm getting cleaner code =D. I updated the SDL_Template I made some time ago, so now it has a GameHandler class which holds the game's statemachine. I've also made a base state class, and have made all states singletons. The State Machine holds 3 states: Current, Previous, and Global. This way I can revert back to the previous state at any time. It will also help with in-game menus, so that I can make the actual game the previous state, and the menu as the current state. I also created an ImageHandler class, which has all my methods for loading/applying images, and also counts how many images are loaded and puts it into a Debug file.

Going on from the Debug file, I have finally set up two different binaries. I have Debug and Release, but now they aren't exactly the same. I have a function called Debug, which takes in a char array, and outputs it to a Debug.txt file. But it's only created if the binary is in Debug mode. This way I can make Debug specific code, so when there's problems, I won't have to put in code to take out later =D.

So as of now, Charge has a nasty segfault, and I think I've found the problem, but worst comes to worst and I will have another recode, but this recode shouldn't take longer than 5 days. The only thing Charge has, at the moment, that my SDL_Template does not have, is: Telegram struct, Message Dispatcher, Entity Manager, Base Game Entity, Derived Classes from Base Game Entity (Game Entity, NPC, PlayerControlled), and the Ship class. So by the end of this recode, Charge should be up and running, and I should be able to take off running with it. The way I've redesigned it, makes it incredibly easy and flexible to program AI, thanks to Programming AI by Example anyways. A lot of the new stuff I'm using is my own revised version of some stuff from that book. I don't find much time to read, so haven't read much from Code Complete, but I'm really stoked to read both that, and finish up Programming Game AI by Example.

Well that was my post to prove I'm not dead, so hopefully I'll make another post later =D.

Emphasis on Design =(

Well, I added in the last two enemies. Problem is, I can't do what I want to do with their AI strictly because of design. I've tried to make little ways around it, but I'll have to recode from the ground up to add in what I need. So for now Charge is on Hiatus, for the time being, I'll be reading Code Complete 2nd Ed, and Programming Game AI by Example. Hopefully I'll get some Charge REDESIGN done. I'm hoping to just do alot of design in my freetime, start making some UML flow charts and stuff so then everything is easy to translate to code.


The biggest thing I'm finding I need to implement, though, is a 'message' handler. This way, I can have the message handler be a singleton, and have it dispatch messages to each object. Each object would contain an ID, so the sender and reciever can be known. This way, when a bullet is coming to hit a mothership, the mothership can send a message to the protectors, and then they can take a bullet for the mothership.

So I'm finding a lot of useful things from this book, so I reccommend you check it out.

Well that's my short post for now, hopefully I'll find time to get something done.

A Big Low =(

Well school has started back up, and it would appear as I have little to no free time. Any free time I can get, I'll put into Charge development, though. So hopefully during Winter Break, I can get it all finished and polished up.


So I won't be making many, if any posts, during the school year, unfortunately =(.

Yay! Back to it's Former... (Opposite of Glory 0.o?)




Well I just got back from camping today. It felt good to get out and get some of the good ol' outdoors. I caught like 8 fish, so I'm happy =p.

Anyways, let's get back to development. I worked a little bit today, and took maybe half an hour to code in the Drone and Revenant. The glitch is completely gone, and with how easy it is to code in enemies, I'll consider making another type of enemy or two, perhaps. The next thing I have on my list is the Enemy Machines, so I don't know how long those will take.

What I need to do for them is:

  • Create a (global? static?) timer for them to share.
  • Create an integer that will change based on the level (will get smaller and smaller) which will be when the timer goes off.
  • Create a system so that the enemy is created at the machine, and then goes into some row and into the field of play.
  • Maybe have a 'life' element to them so they can't be so easily destroyed
  • Make them be able to shoot every 2nd tiem increment(time increment is the integer I talked about) and the bullet will be shot towards the player.

So it isn't a very big list, but some of the stuff may get complicated.

So after I get that done, I just need to add in the protector, then I have a whole lot of effects I want to code in. After all that gets done, I'll consider adding in different types of enemies (maybe a Boss of some sort?). Well that's really all I have to say, I made a little video, but I'm gonna let my friend edit it, so he can get some practice using Sony Vegas, so the vid may look a bit nicer, or not, but hopefully he'll get better and can edit all my videos.

So when he finishes editing that, I'll post it, and let you all know.


Well that's it for me, good luck on any of your own projects.

A Whole Week and No New Posts ???

Well I promise I didn't die =D. Anyways, I've been doing a lot. But I finally got something done, it probably seems small to everyone else, but it's a huge accomplishment for me. I fixed the glitch that haunted me for so long. But now I've actually taken a huge step backward... I recoded the entire game. But the code is now much better. As I was looking at an earlier back up I had, the code was the result of big design flaws. So I got a much better design now, and I'm ready to really start cranking it out on this project.


So now that the little intro is done... Here's what I've been doing...

Well I decided I was going to start delving into a GUI library, I chose wxWidgets and as soon as I got it all set up, I decided that a level editor wasn't that important to me yet. So I looked through some of my books, and found a nice book on AI, so I've been reading that. It has great examples!
It's called Programming Game AI by Example, and I really recommend it =D. So instead of learning a GUI lib, I've been reading up on AI. I've also read a little from Code Complete, so I hope to finish these two books, and more, so I can gain some more knowledge =D.

Anyways, after about 3-4 days of not even looking at the Charge source code, I jumped into it and started code crunching. It seemed all my attempts were futile, so I looked at all my 'design docs' (I use that term VERY loosely) and found I should just recode it. So 3 days after that, I'm here, and I've fixed the bug. The bug was still there 15 minutes ago, but it was a little different, but I was able to fix this one.

So the things that are not in that were in my last build are:
  • Drone
  • Revenant
  • Particle Engine
So it's not really that much. I've decided to throw the particle engine into the whole effects stuff, which I plan to do last.

Right now I wanna focus on the AI. So I plan for the Grunt to be extremely stupid, but it'll be so stupid that it will be like half dangerous. The Drone will be a bit smarter, and the Revenant will have the best AI. From there there will be A-Machines and Protectors. A-Machines will create new enemies every time interval, which is determined by the level you are on. At first it may be 10 seconds per enemy per machine, and it may get to the point where it's less than a second. The protectors are the other type of enemy, they just take bullets for the machines, pretty much, and will sometimes shoot, but that will be an effect thing for later.


So after I get all that AI stuff done, and get the game to a playable state, I'm going to start building up some effects like power ups, particle engine, different bullet types, status bar, (maybe a Boss???), and whatever else I can think of.

After that, I'll try my best to find a graphicist, and sound artist, otherwise it'll be public domain or my crappy graphics.

Well that's all for now, I probably forgot to mention in there, there will be some down time til the next post. I'm going camping tomorrow, and summer is coming to a close. I'll try to get the Drone + Revenant coded before school starts, but once school starts, I don't know how hectic it will be or how much free time I'll have. I'll make posts whenever I can, and have something relevant to post about.

Update for the Sake of Not Updating?

Well, I've been going mad over this bug, I've even rewrote every relevant piece of code, and it just doesn't look like it's going to get fixed. I've decided to take a short break from that, and explore some other things. So I started today and I looked at LazyFoo's tutorials for Creating a Level Editor and Tile Engines. I made my own little demo, and it's pretty sweet =p.


It works just like LazyFoo's but I changed a few things here and there (Didn't Copy + Paste, Mind You). I changed how it checks for a click, by using the state, and not checking only when there's an event, so that you don't have to have a new click. You just click and drag every where. There's also some other stuff I changed, but I can't exactly remember, I'm quite tired right now.

When the level editor exits, everything is saved and then the generated map file can be put into the demo that displays the map and let's you move around. I spent well over an hour creating some complex map with it, and then found the sprite moved much too slow, so I had to crank up the speed =p.

Anyways that's what I got done today. I'm thinking of changing the scrolling in it and having it display the different tiles in a bar that can be dragged around to put it somewhere out of your way. Then you could click to select the tile you want to use. (Thanks to retrothomas for the idea)

Anyways I'm thinking of learning some kind of GUI library, so I can make a nice looking and complex level editor that I can use in future projects.

I have ideas for 2 games I want to make, and I'm thinking I want to make them 8-bit, so I can first of all play around with SDL's Palette system and then I can also make them the awesomeness that 8-bit is.

So right now I'm gonna play around with the simple level editor and make some adjustments with it, etc. Once I'm familiar with the method, I'll start looking into a GUI Library, so if you know of any good ones, comment below =p (Not that anyone even reads my blog xD).

A New Day Brings a New Glitch =(

Video Link!

Well today I spent all of my coding time trying to figure out this nasty bug/glitch. Nothing seems to click with it, I've tested it hundreds of times, I've gone through relevant and irrelevant pieces of code and I just can't seem to find it. Well I'm done for today but maybe someone else can help out while I sleep =D.

So I posted a video which you can see above that show's the glitch, and I've posted all the relevant code in here:

http://palib.pastebin.com/m5314b872


So if you find anything that may help, contact me at xianforce@gmail.com please =/.

Thanks for any support =D.

Day 9 of Charge Development




Well I lied in my last post =p. I said that I was going to work on a different type of bullet next, but as I thought about it, all my bullet ideas really revolve around effects, I think effects should be one of the last things, so I decided to finish all the enemies and get the game play working correctly, then go through and add in all the effects I want and create more levels.

So now I've gotten the next enemy: Revenant.

As of now, Revenants are represented by purple triangles, and in this little test there are a total of 5 enemies: 1 Grunt, 2 Drones, and 2 Revenants.

The Revenants are meant to have the best/most complete AI. I think how I have set them is good for a first level, but I'm planning on giving speed increases, and maybe some 'team AI' in later levels.

Another thing that got done was collision changes. As I was thinking about different bullet types I wanted to implement, it became quickly apparent that circular collisions weren't going to cut it. I needed different widths and heights in some scenarios so I've reverted back to bounding box collisions.

Neither of these things caused any problems at all, the only errors I got were from simple things like forgetting a semi-colon, or forgetting to include a header.

Well that's all that's been done today, I'm still making out some plans for how I'm going to implement Protectors. I'm thinking I'm going to have to implement Protectors and Motherships at the same time to see if they work correctly.


But I've also thought up of a better (in my opinion) game play. Instead of having Mother Ships, I could make some machine. This machine would have a timer on it and would create new ships every so often. As the levels progress, more and more machines are there. Whatever enemy comes out would be either completely random or maybe some kind of order. Protectors would do whatever they could to protect the machines. Like if a player shot a bullet and it was headed towards the machine, the protector would take the bullet.

Well those are my ideas for now, I'm leaning towards the second, because I think it would provide more interesting game play, and that way levels could either be really quick, or really long.

Well, hope to make another post tomorrow, ciao!

Day 8 of Charge Development




Hey guys =D. Yesterday I didn't work on Charge at all. I was playing around with some stuff in PAlib and made a quick game as a 'joke' to enter a compo. So I got that done, and didn't really care to do any more coding for the day, so I just went to bed at that point.

Looking at the screenshot I would hope you'd notice that now there are two different colored enemies. I added a new type of enemy! The blue ones I call Grunts, and the green ones are called Drones. Drones execute paths more often, and don't just randomly shoot like the grunts. They wait until they are within a certain range (horizontally). So their AI is slightly improved.

Most of the day was spent slightly modifying how AI was executed so that there could be varying levels. I'm a bit less than satisfied with how it is right now. With how I have it at this moment, I will have to recreate the AI for every level. Which is fine considering I can just copy and paste it in. Or I can make later levels have improved AI, so I'm contemplating on whether to keep it where it's at, or move it up the chain so that it can be defined once, and then if needed I can overload it in the base class.

So right now I have 3 more enemies planned: Revenants, Protectors, and Mother Ships.

I'm thinking the goal of each level will be to take out the Mother Ships, and the Protectors will... well protect =p. Each of these next enemies will not have normal bullets, so the next thing I'm going to work on is another bullet. Revenants will have the best overall AI. They'll have the best timing on shooting, dodging, path exectution and so on. Protectors will just take a bullet if need be, and perhaps shoot on some conditions. Mother Ships will only dodge, but they will be quite good at it.

So that's all I plan/hope for. After I get some more of this content done, I want to start working on some things like explosion animations for when something blows up. I also want to change how the enemies move idly. So they aren't just bouncing back and forth, I want it to feel a bit more like Galaga.

Anyways, the problems I had today were all with pointers. I would forget to check if something wasn't NULL, before I did something with it, so a bullet would hit an enemy, or the player and program ends returning a 3.

So really it was just little things here and there that I had forgotten, but for the most part it worked very well, just how I thought.

Sometime I am going to HAVE TO REDO THE PATHS THOUGH!!! All the paths suck, and I need to make them better.

Well that's it for today, I'm signing off!

First Video of Charge is Up =D

Hey guys, just wanted to let you know that the first video of Charge is up, it shows all I've gotten accomplished so far. Here's a link:



Alright, that's it for now, I'm still planning a few things out right now, and trying to decide what I want to do next exactly, but I hope to make another post today/tomorrow.

Day 7 of Charge Development

I'm very sorry, I know it's been a few days since I shared an update, but I have gotten quite a lot done.


I actually wiped my computer, so I have very few programs, I'm still working on getting some kind of screen camming software, and video editing software. Once I do I'll throw a video together, and upload it to youtube, for viewing pleasure.

The first few days were real unproductive. I kept getting errors when trying to use static surfaces. I finally fixed it after like 3 days. That meant the particle engine was done for my purposes. I haven't made any more implementations of it, but I'm planning to have particles follow some types of bullets.

So after that got done, I decided to get working on the next thing: Path System.
As of now, the Path System is done, later I'll make the actual paths themselves better.

So the trouble I had with the static variables were all over the place.
I got the right implementation after a while, but the problem was I couldn't load the image for the surfaces, because it would result in a segfault. The segfault happened because SDL functions were called before SDL was initialized. After a day of trying different things and getting help from different people, I finally got it working.

That's the end of the static variable trouble, now let's see what happened with the Path system...


So with the path system I decided each path was going to be an array of points. I'd pass the array into a function that would follow the path. It did this simply by adjusting velocities according to it's position.

The first small problem I came to, was how to find the number of elements in an array. I wanted this function to work on any path, so it needed to be able to find the number of elements in an array. I found using:

sizeof(array) / sizeof(array type)

was a way to get the amount of elements in an array. So I implemented this, and found out they weren't following the path at all. That was the last thing I thought it could be, but then I found the problem.

When you pass an array into a function, what your really getting is a pointer to the first element of the array... so I just had to dereference the array, right?

Wrong.

I tried that thinking it must work now, and I found it went to the first point in the path, and then stopped.

It's a pointer to the FIRST element in the array, not the array. so really what I was doing was this:

sizeof(someArrayOfInts[0]) / sizeof(int)

So really, this is going to evaluate to 1 every time, hence why it only accomplishes one point.

I thought for a second of using a multi dimensional array. When you pass those into a function, you get a pointer to an array, so that could work... except for the fact that anything past the first dimension must be specified.

At that point, I didn't think there would be a way to do it... until after I implemented it with vectors.

So I started using vectors and instantly got it working just how I wanted it to. I just had to make one small tweak. After it completed the path, I wanted it to return to its starting position. After some thought, I realized I couldn't just add their original points in at the end, because the Paths are for all of them. That's when I decided to have each enemy hold a Path that would determine their current path. They also have an integer that controls their path. So when the integer is -1, they don't have a current path, so no path is followed.

After I found this worked perfectly, I just made a function to perform the path logic and it looked a little bit like:

if(rand() == 0)
{
switch(rand() % 3)
{
case 0: pathID = PATH_1; change_path(); break;
//etc
}
}

change_path() just copies the contents of one vector into the enemies own vector of points and then adds in a last point which is it's original coordinates.

So this worked great. After I finished this I just made some wacky paths and let it rip and it works awesomely great.


So that's it for now, I'm still contemplating on what to work on next, but you can expect a video soon.

Day 5 of Charge Development




So I said I'd be working on the quad tree decomposition... and I did. I implemented it and everything and the way I went about it just made it completely suck. After that failed real hard, I thought about how efficient it really was, I figured that every collision is one check, and the work to update the section each frame is significant compared to that, so I've decided to scrap that.

So instead I created a simple particle engine. For the most part, I just took LazyFoo's particle engine and slightly modified it to fit how I wanted it to react. I may expand it a bit but at the moment I'm only worried about one thing: The colored surfaces.

So the problem is that there is 4 surfaces that are used in the particles. LazyFoo has them as global variables but I doubt he'd do that in a real project. It's bad practice because the entire game doesn't need it. The only thing that actually needs it is the levels.

So my problem is that I have to display the surfaces in the particle class, because if I declare them in another class, then they can't be accessed. I don't want every particle I create to create 4 surfaces because that becomes real inefficient, real fast. The solution is supposed to be static variables.

I admit I forgot what the keyword was. I knew what it did though. As of now the variables aren't static, it's getting late so I'll fix it up tomorrow.

The big problem is that static variables can't be initialized in the class they are created in, nor in header files. Not initializing it isn't an option because that causes static variables to not be in scope. So what I'll have to do, is initialize them in the play state, and see if that works.

Well for now that's all I got... so I'll be back tomorrow for another update.

Making up for Lost Time.








Well This isn't the actual development post for today. I woke up about three hours ago, and got to work. I finished everything I wanted in the rewrite. All my code is finally nicely commented and it's real clean and organized, the task now is to keep it that way. So as I go along I'll have to make sure I'm keeping those good habits. Anyways, this post is just about the day void of development, and the post I made like at 2 AM this morning that had no screen shots. I decided to make up for that with 3 screen shots. The first shows all 5 enemies and the player and bullets within the level. The second is after the player has been destroyed, and one enemy destroyed. The last is 2 enemies alive and the player alive.

Anyways, I fixed the collision glitch. The problem was the rendering. The collisions were completely fine.

So down in the code I had something like this:

//Note: This is a function from LazyFoo's tutorials, so if you want more information on how
//it works, check out LazyFoo's site.

apply_surface(circle.x + circle.radius, circle.y + circle.radius, surEnemy, surScreen);


So now what's the problem with this... In my Circle struct, (x,y) is the center of the circle. Surfaces are applied from the top left. Adding the radius to x and y means that the bottom right corner of the actual graphic on the screen will be treated as the top left when calculating the collisions. This meant that sometimes the bullet could completely miss it, and the collision would turn up true. It also meant that the bullet could go right through it and the collision would turn up false. The latter is how I found the glitch. I shot the bullet so perfectly that it went through the center of the first enemy and nothing happened
and it continued up straight through all the enemies and the collision never registered. I just did a little searching and found the problem pretty quickly. Subtracting the radius instead of adding it completely fixed it.

Well that's all I wanted to talk about. Today I'm gonna take a shot at the quad tree decomposition, so I'll make a post tonight about how it goes. Ciao!

Day 4 of Charge Development

I know there's a day that's not counted for. I didn't get anything done yesterday, so I hauled butt today.

So the game actually compiles and works except for one collision glitch. Sometimes the bullets don't kill the enemy... it's weird.

Anyways so what I've gotten done since I started rewriting the code two days ago. I've almost finished the rewrite. It's in a compilable form, but there's still a few touch ups to be made, including fixing that collision glitch. Its real late, and I haven't the slightest clue of where the glitch is coming from, otherwise I'd fix it now. The only 'new' feature, is that the player can shoot up to 5 bullets now, and there are now 5 enemies in my testing level.

I made some nice hierarchies, but I think the inheritance needs some work. The biggest problems I had on this rewrite all seemed to do with inheritance. The first errors I was getting were because I was trying to directly access private data in the base class from a derived class. I decided it would be best to use protected data instead of private in these cases. It's like the best of both public and private. You get the data encapsulation of private member data, while being able to directly access them in a hierarchy. The second thing that really got on my nerves was the bass class not having the functions that the derived classes have.

A great use of inheritance is how you can use a pointer to generalize. So if I wanted to create 5 enemies, but didn't know what type of enemies, I could make an array of pointers like:

Enemy* enemy[5];

So after I declare that, I can store any type of enemy in there as long as the enemy inherits from the Enemy class. That's exactly what I did, but when I needed to call some functions in it, like when deleting the bullets, I'd call a destroy_bullet() method, but destroy_bullet() isn't in the class Enemy. This caused me to use a lot of pure virtual functions.

The first bit of research I want to get done, is to find a better way to control enemies with their projectiles and players with their projectiles. I want a way so I'm not stuffing base classes with pure virtual functions.

Once I get this stuff figured out the next thing I'm going to add is quad tree decomposition... otherwise known as the section system! Once all that is done, and I'm satisfied with it, we'll move on to the fun stuff, AI and new types of projectiles =D.

Well that's the update for yesterday, technically, so I'll try to post another tonight.

Day 3 of Charge Development

I'm not sure how to describe today. After many unsuccessful tries to get the enemy to shoot how I wanted it to shoot, I finally had it. It shooted exactly how I wanted it to. As I looked upon the code, I saw horrible practices everywhere. I knew I could make my life easier if I had just done many things differently. I decided to use the sections thing which I found out is actually called quad tree decomposition (thanks avansc!). Anyways I've decided to use that with circular collisions.

I also looked at the enemy and bullet classes and saw that it was going to suck when I wanted to create different types of enemies/bullets, so I grabbed a pen and paper and planned a lot out.

I decided that since I'll be changing so much, I might as well rewrite it, and comment more of it, and make it look better overall. So most of my day has gone to that, I'm nearing the end as I'm typing this post. As of now it won't compile so no screen shots today.

I'm camming the entire process with Camtasia and I'm goina to speed it up really really really fast and add in some touches and make it my intro video for any other videos I post.

Well that's what's going on. I can't wait to finish because it's going to make many things so much easier.

Day 2 of Charge Development




Hey guys, today it seems I got less done, but I still spent about the same amount of time I think. Today I created a simple block enemy that moves side to side for testing purposes. I then added in a collision function for collisions between enemies/bullets and players/bullets. I think, since it will be like Galaga, I can skip the collisions between enemies, as they will probably just move side to side, and I'll have some sort of path function that they can randomly execute. So in short, collisions between enemies won't be necessary.

I want to optimize how I check the collisions though, because checking all the enemies every frame just seems inefficient. At the moment I'm thinking of splitting the screen into 12 sections, and each object will have a variable to hold it's section. Each section would be 40 x 40 pixels, so I think that would only leave a couple checks, considering the sprites are 16x16 (bullets are 8x8).

I haven't added the sections yet, because I'm waiting for some opinions from other people to see if there's a better way to do it, but as of now, I think that's how I'll do it.

For all the games and demos I've made so far, I've always used bounding box collisions, its simple, you check 4 sides and your done. But I'm starting to find a 'bounding circle collision' detection might be more efficient. Instead of checking 4 sides, you check 1, it's all done with the radius. So I'm looking into that and maybe in the future I'll switch over to that.

Now that we've gone over the things I've been thinking about, let's see what was actually done.

The collision system has the capability for collisions between enemy/bullet and enemy/player, but it technically only handles enemy/bullet. The reason being the enemy moves left to right, as does the player, and the enemy doesn't shoot yet. But it's handled to where both objects involved in the collision are destroyed.

So the small things I had trouble with were a few segmentation faults =(. I quickly found them, but just as quickly forgot to fix others. The first segfault came from the bullet. With my collision function it returns an enumeration that I created that will tell whether the player or player's bullet collided with the enemy/bullet. The problem was it didn't check to see if a bullet was even there at all, so whoila, segfault.

The others were just the same, only with the player and enemy. They did their logic and rendering every frame, without any checks to see if they were NULL.


So today was pretty easy, I didn't code too much, and didn't have that many problems, but let's take a look into what I'm hoping for tomorrow.


So I definitely want to look into those two collision efficiency issues I talked about, but I'm not going to spend the whole day doing that. I want to start planning out more, so tomorrow I'm going to grab some paper and start drawing out the hierchies for the play mode and enemies so I'll be planning out multiple enemies. I may also work on planning a class to make paths. I'm thinking I could have path objects and have a function in the enemy class that follows the path. In the enemies logic I'd just have it randomly choose between moving side to side, or following a path, then it'd randomly choose a path. But this is all speculation, just some ideas.

But Tomorrow I'm definitely going to implement a timer and start capping the FPS. I'm also going to try to work on a system to get the enemy to shoot. If I find more positive views towards the whole idea about splitting the screen into sections, I could certainly implement that as well.

Well it's getting late and I must get up early so tomorrow's another day, and another update!

A New Week, and A New Project





Well it's a new week and I've started a new project. After finishing Pong, I thought about what project I wanted to take on next. So I thought for a while, and thought Break Out or Galaga would be good ones, but after reading a comment on my Pong video from youtube, I decided to go with a Galaga type game. I've also decided to be a bit more 'artistic' and stray from exactly what Galaga is, so I'm calling it Charge. For now I think Charge is a temporary name, because I think all the different weapons (I'm planning power-ups, so that is plural) will have something to do with electricity. The other two games I have made took only about a week, but I am sure this one will take significantly longer. I'm excited from what will come of this game, because all the different things I'm going to work with that I haven't really worked with before.

The things I'm really aiming to implement in this right now are:

-Projectile System
-Particle Engine
-AI

Those are three huge things in game developement, and it's pretty important that I work with them. I read a little bit about particle systems, and it doesn't seem like it will be too hard to implement a simple particle engine. The AI will probably be the toughest thing, though. I don't want it to have incredibly dumb AI, I want it to actually be relatively good. Of course there will be other stuff in the game, but I don't want to blab all about concepts, so let's get onto what I got done today.

Early today, I did some set-up and created the state machine, and separated everything into files, and just made a project that compiled and created the screen. I then made some place holder graphics, one space-ish background, a red square to represent the ship, and a yellow square to represent the bullet.

I then created a Play state, but one thing that grazed my mind was how I am going to implement levels, I'm still thinking about it, but I'm sure I'll come up with something semi-intelligent. Once I had my Play state mapped out, I created a Ship and Bullet class. I'm using pointers a lot in this one so everything isn't on the stack, I'm finally starting to allocate some memory on the heap =D. I soon found that it proses a few problems, you have to be very careful in that everything that is allocated, is deallocated. When I ran the first 'build' (I'm using that term VERY loosely), the movement was out of control, and when you shot a bullet it would travel just as I had expected. I then kept pressing Space (Note: Space is the button to shoot) repeatedly to see the effect. The effect was that the bullet in the air disappeared and it seemed to revert back at the ship. I knew better than that though.

When I handled events for the ship, I had a switch block like this:

switch(event.key.keysym.sym)
{
case ...
...
...
...
case SDLK_SPACE:
bullet = new Bullet();
break;
}



See if you can spot the problem here...

The memory allocated, was never deallocated, so it just keeps using more and more memory while the old memory is lost forever. I pulled an easy fix making sure to not let the player create another bullet if another was already active, I'll be sure to add in more bullets later, but for testing purposes I'll stick to one.


The next problem I faced had me stuck for about a half hour. I could shoot, and it wouldn't let me shoot until the bullet was NULL. I assumed when you use the keyword 'delete' that the pointer is automatically assigned the value of NULL, I guess not though.

So what actually happened is the bullet would travel outside of the room, get deleted and now I have a stray pointer, then I have a statement that says something like:

if(bullet == NULL)
{
bullet = new Bullet();
}


So pointer doesn't actually equate to NULL, because I didn't explicitly set it to NULL. After I figured that out, I set it to NULL, and now the projectile system somewhat works.


So that's what I got done today, here's what I have planned for tomorrow:

Add in stationary enemies (So Enemies with no AI)
Add in collisions between the Bullet and Enemies
Add in collisions between the player and enemies

At the moment I'm thinking that a collision will result in destruction of both objects, and if at any time there is no player, the game will end, but when I get further in development to create a lives system, I'll just have a life be subtracted.


But another little thing I've had my mind on is how I'm going to handle collisions, I'm going to have to look into it a bit more, because there's going to be an abundance of enemies in the actual game most likely, so I don't want to check for a collision between every object, so I'm going to have to find a more efficient way to do so.

Back from vacation, here's the update!

Well after that long vacation, I should have something to show for it, and I do =0. I ended up actually finishing Pong, I accomplished everything I wanted in it, so I'm ready to move onto something else.

So at the bottom of this post, I'll have a link to the video of Pong, so if you want to watch it, go ahead.

Anyways, at the start of my vacation, the regular 2 player mode worked, except there was no system to keep score. I had a little bug on displaying the score, I was keeping track of the score in an integer called points, and I used a little C to display the integer as a string. so I was doing something like this:

void add_point()
{
++points;

char pointAmount[3];
sprintf(pointAmount, "%d", points);
surPoints = TTF_RenderText_Solid(font, pointAmount, textColor);
}

Since pointAmount is an array of characters, its passed as a char* into functions, which should satisfy the the function. Problem is it didn't. Later I found out, I had forgot to declare it as an array, so it couldn't convert from char to const char*. After that was fixed, the regular 2 Player Pong worked fine, the next step was to create so I could actually play alone =p.

Now I haven't the slightest clue what I did wrong in making the CPU. I made it and I looked over it quite a lot. And after it was done, it was the buggiest thing I had ever seen in my life. The thing looked like it was on speed, bouncing around like no tomorrow. The more I tried to pin down what was wrong, the worse it got. I decided it was too horrible to even use, so I took it out and decided to start from scratch.

Before I re-started the CPU, I implemented a pause feature. It sucked, but it worked for the time being. I just used an SDL_Delay after rendering if a pause flag was true.

When I remade the CPU system, it worked completely how I had planned, so that portion was done with.

I then upgraded the pause feature to what it is now, I had no problems with this, it was actually really simple.

After that, I just wanted to add in sounds, change the graphics a bit, and add in a challenge mode. So the first thing I did was add in sounds, all the music I used was created by Rachel J. Morris (LussikkaMage) and were taken from her public domain sounds over at Moosader.com. The sound effects were just some other public domain sounds that I got from a random site that isn't really important.

I made the graphics myself (hence why they suck), but it is a little more interesting than the black and white it was before.

The challenge mode became a problem when I failed at making a timer. I screwed up the timer's pause and resume methods, so the score would go out of wack when the game was paused. I found the problem, I forgot subtract the current time, from the start time when I assigned the value to the ticks when paused.


After all that was done, I took a 3 day break and got some nice relaxation. I also made a little bouncing ball demo while I was up there, because I was bored, and wanted to play around with some gravity effects.


Well that's the end of Pong development, soon I'll start my next project and will document everything about it.

Pong Video

The Creation of This Blog =)

Important Links/References: PAlib, Elysian Shadows, LazyFoo, SDL, Moosader

The links I have posted above are things worth checking out =p.




Hey guys, I doubt any of you know, but I had another blog prior to this blog. Due to difficulties with Google accounts, it had to be deleted, and thus a new one made. I'm not going to go back and re-make all my posts, I think it will be better and easier if I just completely start anew and perhaps just bring up small details from previous posts.

Now that all that stuff is over and done with, let's get on to the real introduction.

I'm Skylar, and I'm a novice game programmer, and I have been programming for almost 2 years now. Up until this point, I haven't been real sure of what language/API I wanted to use, so I had a lot of mixed knowledge, and little to no experience. I finally got tired of it so I looked around, and decided to use C++ and SDL as my language and library, respectively.

This blog will detail the different challenges I come across, how I solve them, and it will also cover what progress is made. I hope to be able to post something relevant everyday, except for this week, because I'm on vacation and won't have internet for much longer.


At the creation of this blog, I have my first game with SDL finished: Tic Tac Toe, and I am working on my second game, Pong. I know these are beginning projects you generally see everywhere, but I'm trying to give my Pong clone some extra features that make it stand out from the rest.


Now I guess I'll talk a bit about my inspiration for getting into game development. As a kid, I always had the dreaming fantasies most of us have about making our own game. We get great ideas and we don't think much about how hard game development actually is. Well a few friends and I got a bit overambitious and detailed a large game out, I still can't even remember what genre of game it was. Well through a friend, I stumbled upon Game Maker and used that quite a bit at first, but I didn't like it so much, I used it for school projects to score some extra credit, but I hardly used it.

Then I bought a flashcart for DS. After searching through Youtube videos of how to set it up, I found a video about a DS homebrew project; Super Smash Bros DS. I watched the video, and even though it was only a simple demo, I was absolutely amazed. I thought, "I wish I could do something like that!" and through the comments box on that video, I found PAlib, a library for programming DS games. I found I would need to learn a programming language and I chose C. I then went through simple pieces of the library and had a lot of trial and error.

I didn't understand a lot of key features of the C language, things I would need to understand to get anywhere with game development. For example, the first game I made with it, was a copy of Bowman for the DS, it had no menu/title screen, and it only had birds that could be shot. The graphics sucked, everything was either a line or a ball, and the programming on it was just horrid. When I would clear the screens, instead of making a function to call the 6 functions to clear the backgrounds and sprites from both screens, then reinitialize text on both screens, I just called the 6 functions everytime the screens needed to be cleared.

After all that epic failure, I found another homebrew project that looked very interesting: Elysian Shadows. The project looked amazing, and they had a video series titled "The Adventures in Game Development." Falco (The leader of this team) also had some videos on how to get started on Game Development, I watched them and it completely changed my perspective on what I needed to do. He really laid it out. He didn't obscure anything, he told it like it was. So the next day I went out and bought a nice big book on C++, and after reading most of I started to learn the API, SDL. I found Lazy Foo's tutorials and I must say they are amazing.

So that's how I got started on game development, hope any reading this make the jump into it as well.