VectorStorm Blog

Today, I have player control working in a simple box world.  Tomorrow, I start work on the world and the rough game rules.  That’ll leave the weekend for overall game structure and polish.  I love it when a plan comes together!

So here ya go.

Today, I’ve been struggling with some old 2D rendering code, trying to make lines line up properly between separate objects.  In this shot, the smaller rectangle should be adjacent to one of the other rectangles, but for some reason is not.  Can’t really figure it out.  But it’s time to get some sleep, so I’ll try again tomorrow, with a fresh brain.

UPDATE (a few minutes later):  Found the bug.  I really need to fix up some of this old code, where objects have constructors that take seven or eight parameters, all of numeric types and with default parameters such that if you forget to include one in the middle, all the rest of the parameters which you do provide end up being autoconverted into other numeric types and used for the wrong parameters.  Everything’s now working, so hopefully I’ll be able to get a proper prototype of the base game mechanics up and going tomorrow.  Now, time for sleep.

I’ve mentioned before that my parents read this blog.  And that my current boss reads it as well.  Also, several of my old workmates started reading it when I posted my retrospective of my time in the games industry.  And now I’ve learned that several of my current workmates have discovered it as well.  So, um, hi, guys!  There’s nothing for making this sort of rapid prototyping exercise successful like the fear of eternal ridicule if I let it drag on past the deadline, like I did with “Lord”.  ;)

So, I’ve figured out a game design to use.  I think it’s clever, and it fits the randomly chosen sentence quite well.  And no, I’m not going to tell you about the game design yet.  Because I’m secretive and because I’m paranoid that I’ll think of something better immediately after posting anything specific.  But never fear, I’ll show a confusing and non-helpful screenshot of progress on the prototype tomorrow evening.  Knowing me, it will probably be a large mass of colourful glowing lines that make no sense to anybody but me.  Because that’s just the sort of guy I am.

To be honest, most of my “Game in a Week” games haven’t had their rough designs figured out until about halfway through, and ThunderStorm’s design didn’t come to me until about five hours before the deadline.  So I still have plenty of time to change my mind.  Most of these games are actually implemented almost entirely over the closing weekend, with little code being written before then.  Very much like Ludum Dare, but with a week of planning and prototyping beforehand.

Anyhow, that’s enough time spent on the blog for the evening;  time to get back to the code!  More chat tomorrow.

So for the first time in many months, I’ve spent the day sitting in front of the television, working on an old laptop instead of my normal desktop development machine.

Comments, in point form:

• As “background noise” behind programming, television seems to work a lot better than music for me.
• My laptop really is a lot slower than the desktop machine.  Also, its keyboard is really unpleasant to type on.  (Full disclosure:  I’m an unrepentant keyboard snob.  If it isn’t mechanical, then it’s awful for programming.  Yes, I provide my own keyboards for use at work, because no development studios ever provide anything but the most horrible and ancient Logitech rubber-dome keyboards)
• As a result of the above two points, I should really consider buying a TV tuner card for the desktop machine.  Kind of expensive, though.
• Today I created the source code repository for storing 104 (whatever it ends up being named), and the initial project framework.  It does run, although right now it only displays the word “Test”.  I’m starting to really think that it takes too long to create new projects in VectorStorm.  I should really have a standard “starting” project, instead of having to spend an hour on it every time I start something new.
• The folks at my current workplace are big proponents of strong pointers.  There are a lot of good arguments for using strong pointers, most notably that they perform a sort of poor man’s garbage collection, automatically destroying objects which are no longer in use, whereas ordinarily in C++ you need to explicitly destroy objects once you’re finished with them.  The downside, of course, is a performance cost in using the smart pointer.  And for that matter, they do make debugging a little more annoying for a couple of reasons.  But man, after a few months of writing code using smart pointers, it’s really easy to get out of practice with remembering to explicitly destroy every object you create.  I’m really glad that VectorStorm has built-in memory leak detection, or I’d be in serious trouble.
• Every one of my classes always begins with a two or three letter prefix, telling where that class comes from.  For example, VectorStorm library files all begin with “vs”.  Source files in MMORPG Tycoon all begin with “mmo”.  I was at a loss, though, for what to call the files for 104, since it’s not legal to use numbers to name classes in C++.  In the end, I went with the roman numberals “civ”.  Even though the game will most definitely not be Civilization.
• Have brought all the accumulated VectorStorm changes from MMORPG Tycoon 2 into the live trunk.  No new features, but vsRenderTarget is halfway to being exposed for use by games, for offscreen rendering.  It’s already being used by the vector glow effect.

I still don’t know what 104 will actually be.  Been thinking about “hundred” and “four” as being separate things.  Maybe not even quantities, but instead, names for things.  But I don’t have a real answer yet.  But there’s still plenty of time to figure out a design!

I’ve noticed that 104, in roman numerals, is CIV.

I’d be feeling really clever, if there was any way in the world that I could make a game like Civ in only seven days.  As is, it’s just another dead-end in my attempts to come up with a theme for this GiaW.  But there’s plenty of time left, still!