It Isn't All Coding, You Know

So today was a productive even if very little coding was done. I did a few tweaks to the ImageSheet and finished the Tile Class. I created the base of my Mob Class (for Mobile) which is based of the various Dot, Square, and Sprite classes from Lazy Foo'. For now I am done with his tutorials. I have some ideas for other exercise projects, like a simple maze game, which will deal with MOB-TILE collisions, scalable windows and camera movement.

The Connect Four project will cover mouse event handling, simple collision detection, layered graphics, and some basic animation. At first it will be a "two-player" game but I do intend to create an AI for it as well.

Today was a Project Management day. Aside from planning on what my next little exercise projects will do, I spent time figuring out what Revision Control System I am going to use. Sure, for now I am the only working on all of this, but even now getting used to some level of control. Not to mention, I would like to keep "older" versions of the classes as I work though them.

I also gave some thought and planning to how I will promote this project as I get more and more familiar with what I am doing and have some actual code pieces to show for it. So after a some time not making any sense of Microsoft Documentation on its version control system, I had my "Well, Duh!" moment, and remembered Sourceforge. I wanted some external hosting of the files anyway, and this does SVN (as well as other forms of source control.) A quick google to get the SVN plug-in for Visual Studio and I was golden. All the working files I have are now uploaded and under version control. Now I can easily move between computers and even change my IDE should I feel the need. (Like if I want to do some cross platform compiling in Linux)

The link over in the Current Status section to the project page. Not much there right now, but over time I will flesh it out. I thought about moving the blog over there as well, but it will be easy enough to cross connect here and there.

So here is what is coming up next:

Connect Four: this should take about a week to get something fairly basic up and running. I expect most of my time to be dealing the graphics and animations. The logic of the game is fairly straight forward. However more time will be spent in the "Make it pretty" category.

In the queue (Not necessarily in this order):

Maze Game: Something to do random map creation, mob-tile collisions, scrolling screens and some more interactive issues.

TIE Fighter: One of the first games for my Apple II was a simple X-Wing v TIE Fighter game. Basically it was try to shoot the moving TIE fighter while it move about the screen.

Space Invaders: A fairly basic game that needs to deal with collision and destructible environments

Missile Command: Another Arcade classic with a good deal of randomization, delay, chain events and collisions.

Castle Wolfenstien/DOOM: Granddaddy of FPS. But also a start in to pseudo 3D. I might even make the jump to OpenGL and do some more in depth 3D work at this point

There will be other exercise projects as well. Also I will be finding some books on some more advanced game design theory. This should keep me busy for a few months. During which time I will slow put together my design doc for YAR.