Thursday, May 20, 2010

Daily Developer: Day 73

Brought over "player" object from my other game and cleaned it up to compile in my new game.  Will work on adding a movable component next.

Duration: 00:20

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Daily Developer: Day 72

Spent some time fiddling with the OptionsManager, the portion that reads and writes options from an XML file.  Have that working again, but the place I moved it to doesn't allow for it to be accessed by other portions of the application.  I'll have to work out a better location for it, or have it return an object that can be passed around.  I'll likely put some effort into that tomorrow, as well as creating a new base for future games.

 Duration: 00:24:52

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Day 71: Early Morning Fun

I've been getting up earlier the past week or so, and today I woke up even earlier, so I had some time to spend on game development.

Mostly, I was doing some pretty mundane stuff.  I removed some extra things that were left over from my other game but didn't pertain to this one.  I also created a base version copy of the current game to have an easy place to start from when I create other physics based games.

Needed to cut it short this morning, since it was time to take my daughter to school and for me to go to work.  I know I spent at least 10 minutes, possibly 20 on it today.  I'll have to update my tool to automatically save the time to a file when exiting.

Duration: ~20

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Daily Developer: Day 70 -- Back to it again

My first real obstacle with testing my consistency was the preparation of our old house for sale.  Clearly, I was unable to clear the hurdle and have been spending most of my time since on getting the old house ready for sale, buying a new house, moving our stuff from the old house to the new house and putting everything where it belongs.  Now, however, I am finally ready to take the steps back into my daily software development.

Something I noticed about returning was that it was more intimidating than I thought it would be.  Perhaps not intimidating, but I was less inclined to start back up after stopping than I was to simply continue when I had not stopped.  I suppose the whole routine thing does make a difference.

Today, my efforts focused on getting the menu screens into the base game and getting it to run without crashing.  Then, I resolved all the StyleCop issues.  I now have a base game to begin with.  Tomorrow, I will start by labeling the build as a good base and then working the first version of the new game.

Duration: 00:36:44

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Daily Developer: Day 69

It is easy to get out of sync with routines.  I am in the process of buying a new house and selling the old one, and it is providing enough of a distraction that I was able to drop my daily routine.  Hopefully this will be my return to it.

I started a brief design document based on the previously detailed requirements.  I didn't get far into it before determining it would be a good time to create the project and add the third party elements that I knew I was planning on using.  I have added the farseer physics engine, and started looking at the game state management pieces again.  The game state management is less straightforward than simply including.  Tomorrow, I'll pull the necessary components and get it all compiling.

Duration: 00:33:59

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Daily Developer: Day 68 - The New Game

Nothing gets the imagination going like the start of a new project.  Based on some of the accidental gameplay I discovered in my ToxicGrowth project, I started brainstorming for my new game that I am designating "Project Elasticity."

While there is a lot I don't know about how I want everything in this game to behave, I did take the time to pick a starting point.  I am going to use one type of gameplay to start with, with the expectation that there will be a variety of fun ways to play and styles to choose from.

I used Freemind to come up with some of my general ideas, then I selected some of the details and created a basic requirements document in Google Docs that only covers the one aspect of the game I am currently interested in.

My goal for tomorrow is to take the concepts outlined in my requirements document and try to solidify them a bit in a design document.  Since I am working on a small portion of a game that could be pretty big, it shouldn't take too long to come up with a basic design.  Though, I did notice as I was describing things in the requirements doc that there were several concepts that were much bigger than the simple sentences it took to describe them.

Duration: 01:07:56

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Daily Developer: Day 67 - The Return

Things have settled down enough that I am able to return to my daily routine.  My task today was to simply get re-acclimated with the game and the code itself. What I've determined is that I really don't think that game as it currently is has much potential for ever being fun.  So, instead of slogging along, trying to force it to be something that it will never be, I think I am going to retire it.  I might post the code somewhere, in case it is interesting to anyone, but I think it is time to move on to other games.

Working on this game has sparked some other ideas for other games.  I think my goal for the next couple days is going to be try to nail down the details of how I want my new game to perform.  I might actually *gasp* write out a quick little requirements document so that I have a guideline for what I am expecting.  At the very least, I anticipate that this will help me determine what makes a requirements document into something that is truly useful, something that I think I would be able to pull over into my job.

Duration: 00:15:33