Monday, January 21, 2008

Development Woes

Seeing as this is the first game I've ever programmed using the game engine I've been building over the last two years, I knew I would have a lot of problems to solve. I've gotten over a lot of hurdles that I've come across, and I'm learning more everyday, plugging away everyday, but some days, I just want to have it done.


A lot of the stuff are design patterns not common to me. Essentially what I'm finding is that designing systems for large numbers of objects that require constant updates and such seems to become more and more complicated. The more problems I solve, the more I seem to come across as well. Once again, I'm still making progress, but it's requiring a lot of testing, a lot of small tests for implementing new systems and unfortunately, because I'm learning as I go along, a lot of re-writing things as well.

The most important thing that I'm learning I think, is that sometimes it's important to take the time and think about a problem from many different angles. If you don't you can find yourself designing an entire system that can later get tossed out, and then you end up losing a lot of time that you can't get back.

Things slowed down a little bit on the development front this last week. I didn't make as much progress as I had wanted because of the problems mentioned above. This simply means I'm either going to have to learn to more efficient, or have to end up putting in more time so that I can try and make up for lost time, or both. At any rate, I'll have some screen shots and more meaningful posts later in the week, maybe even a video, but we'll have to see how far I make it. Also, I've been aiming for an end of the month completion, but it may end up being a few weeks beyond that, but I should have some game play by the end of the month for sure, I just want to take the time to polish things up, but I do plan on having a play session at next months Game Developer Forum here in Ankeny Iowa. Back to coding.

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