One of the things we had to do for MAR2 was work in a different compiler than I was used to.  Rather than visual studio we worked with a program that was specific to the gameboy.  Line by line debugging was slightly more difficult, and projects as a whole were a little more difficult to work with, but it had some specific things that visual studio did not which made it more appropriate for the job.

Working in a new workspace is frustrating at first however  once you’re accustomed to the environment, it’s still just code.  It was a good learning experience, though the lack of ability to debug was frustrating at times.

The biggest hurdle to get over when I began coding on the gameboy/ds was dealing with hardware specific memory locations.  Setting up how the program ran, everything from the sprites to the video mode had to be set by altering the data at a certain memory address. There is a lot of dealing with data and making sure it lines up with byte boundries and doesn’t overwrite other existing data.

Because of this class I’m now a lot more familiar /comfortable working with bitwise operations and bitmasking, as well as caring about data size, and data location in memory.

We had a 2nd class this month; optimization.  We became a little more familiar with threading as well as covering vtune for profiling your code and micro operations to increase your code speed.  Unfortunately it was the instructors last month at FS and the class was fairly loosly structured as a result.  We had several days of class canceled and were often out of class early.  The biggest asset from that class was the comfort level increase with threading and an introduction to optimizing your program.

I had a lovely visit with my mother over Thanksgiving vacation and am now diving into AI and Real Time Animation for the month of December. I’ve been dealing a little bit with work-overload and burnout, so the next 3 weeks can’t go fast enough. I’m really in need of the 2 week Christmas vacation.

If you want to submit your site, send a direct message or mention to my twitter @mar33 or email margutteter@gmail.com and I’ll get you on our preliminary list and make sure you know when the site goes up.

Here’s a screencap of the content empty base for our website with Design by TJ and site structure put together by me.

The site will consist of an aggregated feed for game development, divided up into subsections for production, art, design, and programming.  Visitors to the site will not only be able to subscribe to the full feed (or a specific subfeed of their choosing) and read latest posts, but they can also browse a full list of the blogs listed which will also include blogger’s twitter names (if they have one).

Visitors can also follow the twitter feed we intend to set up which will post about new blog posts as they are available in the feed.  In addition there will be a page to allow visitors to submit their site for feed inclusion.

For feed cleanliness, each blog will be hand approved to insure no spam and no inappropriate sites are listed.  Sites should be blogs, this isn’t a feed for advertising.  Each post will also be individually approved by the administrators so subscribers don’t need to worry about their feed’s getting polluted with garbage.

Like what we’re doing? Want your site included?

Send me a message or a mention on twitter @mar33 and I’ll add you to the list.  Don’t have a twitter? Feel free to also email your blog to margutteter@gmail.com. There’s no restriction on what links I’m taking at this point, so please, submit away! Thanks for everyone who’s submitted already. For those of you who’re too excited about the list to wait, there’s a sampling of the links I’ve gotten too far after the jump. I haven’t completely filtered these yet, but I don’t think any of them are spammers, advertisers, or just plain jerks, so we should be ok.

If I forgot you, missspelled your name, URL, or twitter name, please don’t shoot me. But you CAN tweet/email me and I’ll get it taken care of. SPECIAL thanks to all of you guys for your early submissions.

I initially just wanted to get a list of these blogs for myself to put into my feed reader.  I want to read what everyone is doing, but with the number of blogs and sometimes the infrequency of the posts it just doesn’t make sense to check daily. Google reader is awesome for that.

Then I realized that I can’t possibly be the only person who likes to see what everyone is up to. Isn’t that the point of social networks, to creep on everyone else? At any rate, I decided I’d collect links to FSGD students and alumni alike and compile a big like of names, blogs, and twitter accounts.  I plan to put it on a website of its own and allow visitors to submit their sites.   Right now, it’s just a list in notepad on my desktop.

I would like to hope that an aggregation of these blogs will get more readers for everyone, and help everyone stay more connected with the blogs.

If you’d like to help out with the website design or development in any way, or want to submit your blog, feel free to email me at margutteter [at] gmail.com or send me a mention or a direct message on twitter @mar33.
Thanks for your interest in my project!

Some of the things I worked on:

• AI for the galaxy map
• tools to design both the galaxy map (theres different maps you can get each time you play) and the missions.
• Planets taking damage, getting captured, spawning enemies, and regenerating health.
• Streamlining the particle manager and particle effects

The purpose of the class was less “make a good game” (we save that for final project) and more “learn the ups and downs of making a game”.  We certainly did. The class ran of a semi-scrum production pattern.  With this, our development time was broken up into 4 sprints which were each tailored to getting the game to a specific level of completion.  Between each of the sprints, we spun what was called “the wheel of misfortune”.  It is filled with negative things that can happen to your team, from switching a random team member with another team to turning in the sprint early.

My group was relatively blessed by the wheel in that we didn’t get the dreaded team swap.  The first spin, we got “mod community”.  Mod community was a relatively easy “misfortune” to handle.  If you download the game and go to options, you’ll notice a “mods” option.  There is a folder in the game’s directory where you can drop files from the weapon editor we created which allows you to create your own guns for in game use. Unfortunately I don’t have that editor to let you try out.

Our 2nd spin of the wheel of misfortune was pretty easy too, we got “supersize a feature”.  We initially planned to have only 3 upgrades for your ship, but we expanded that to about 7 + additional weapons to purchase.  You can see the results of this spin by loading up the game and pressing space bar on the galaxy map. This will load up the shop.  I was in charge of making the shop UI and making it work.

Our 3rd spin of wheel of misfortune was probably more helpful than it was negative, we recieved “QA Core Team”.  The final sprint involved bug testing for another team in the class and fixing bugs that a team had found on our game.  The bug quota was a mere 2 bugs per 1000 lines of code, which was upped to 3 for my group.  Bug testing was fun and challenging.

SGP didn’t introduce many new concepts as far as coding goes but I did learn a great deal about working on a team.  We encountered challenges along the way with communication, conflicting code, and work distribution.  The biggest of these issues was communication, and most of the other issues boiled down to that also.  We resolved this by almost constantly having a team member available on skype or by text message if someone had an issue.  I personally elected to stay signed into skype mobile on my android phone so that I could always see what was going on.  We set up a group chat on skype and that way we always had a way to get ahold of someone, or everyone.

And here it is, my baby for the last 2 months: Space Wars in Space! Give it a download!

We’ve just turned in our 3rd sprint of work and our game is mostly feature complete at this point. Space Wars in Space has missions done in a top down arcade style shooter style, but each mission is essential in the overall goal to take over the entire galaxy.

I feel compelled to give you the loading screen before you see the rest.

Our menu screen. It looks a heck of a lot more exciting in its full animated glory. All the panels slide in and out when called upon and the background has a lovely rotating – galaxy effect going.

This is the galaxy map.  This map is turn based for the player and the two enemies.  The three different colors of nodes indicate systems and their owners, blue being the player.  The links between them indicate paths to travel.  The player can attack systems adjacent to his own and upgrade his own systems defenses to make them harder for the enemies to capture.

Gameplay is simple — there is a large mission map area littered with planets that spawn enemies when you approach. You can choose to destroy or capture planets, each resulting in a unique reaction to the mission as well as the money earned when the system has been captured.

Stay tuned: once we’ve completed bug testing and have all our final art, we’ll have new and improved screenshots (the main menu will have a prettier background!), including screenshots of the shop, all 5 enemy types, and more gameplay.  Follow me on twitter to get the latest updates as well as the date and time for the SGP Expo where you can play the game for yourself!

The most difficult part of the class for me by far was understanding what was happening and when in order to get proper synchronization.  I found that the best way to solve this was to thoroughly comment the code for myself before I had written it with a series of explanations of what was happening and when.  It made the synchronization much easier to understand when I was writing it and easier to debug when it got deadlocked later.

We used a wrapper written by our course director to interact with threads, but through this API we learned several major new skills:

• Start threads with the appropriate thread attributes
• Create and use lock and change objects
• Get complete synchronization so the program runs in exactly the order specified and avoid deadlock
• Debug threads to understand what they’re doing and solve race conditions, “thrashing”, and deadlock

I completed the OPS Course at the end of July with a 100% on the programming final and a 92% (A) in the class.  I’ve found myself considering threading as a solution for my current game and look forward to implementing threading into future projects.

We used states fairly heavily in SGD and while I previously had not understood their important, I now see no reason to go any other way as far as switching between, well, different states in my game.  I also fell in love with the singleton design pattern during SGD. And then I fell back out of love with it, and then I finally settled on a happy medium for them.  While initially I thought it would be an absolutely amazing idea to make EVERYTHING into a singleton, I quickly learned better of it.  I’ve settled on asking myself “do I need global access?” before I create a singleton. If the answer is no, well, it shouldn’t be a singleton.  If the answer is yes, well then it can MAYBE be one.  I’m now fairly stingy with what actually gets granted singleton status.

Aside from design patterns, my skill as a programmer broadened in several ways during the month.  I learned about coding on a time-budget.  By the end of the month I became far more efficient by becoming a planning fiend.  As happens every month, I’m a stronger debugger than I was when I started the month.  How come nobody showed me visual studio’s pause button before? I don’t know, but now I know what to do if I get stuck in an infinite loop.  I also reiterated to myself the value of a clean and rebuild.  Not before I thoroughly stepped through some code that was error free several times though. Much headdesking was had by all. Above all SGD reminded me the importance of hard work. During our project I put in about 64 hours a week of solid work/code time.  16 hour days will get to you, but when you’re doing something you love and you’re motivated to work on your project, it is so worth it. Every little personal milestone just drove me harder to get everything working.

Rules of the Game was not so much game programming class as it was a game design class.  We prototyped the design for SGP (structure of game production) in July.  We accomplished lots of testing of our game idea with several different groups of people, both internal and external.  The biggest thing I learned? The user is dumb.  Even if the user isn’t dumb, they won’t understand things you think they should.  It was difficult to step away from the testing centers and just watch people play. I wanted to explain and to help them.  And after they were done, it was hard to just soak up the information and not justify why we did it the way we did.  The user is always right, and that was a tough pill to swallow.

However I’m glad my teammates and I were able to, because we gained some very valuable testing information which really has helped us so far in the design phase of our SGP game.  It’s always exciting.  My current classes at 9am come early but it’s just not that bad when I’m excited to go to class and work on my game.

Finals last month I ended up with an 83% on the programming 1 final and a 94% on the calculus final. That left me with a 92%in programming and a 96% in calculus. Both As, woohoo! I’m not nearly as optimistic about my programming 2 final coming up next week, but I’m definitely excited for Christmas vacation.

Right now, however, I’m excited to spend this whole weekend relaxing and getting extra sleep. I’ve got a lot to recover from, and a hectic 4 days of review and then finals starting next Monday.

This school is EXHAUSTING!

I think the final went fairly well. I got the highest grade in the class on the last test, a 99% which I’m pretty proud of. I could have taken my time in order to get a higher grade on the final but I don’t think it was imperative to my grade, so we’ll see.  Plus I got both of the extra credit questions right for sure, AND our instructor gave everyone in the class 5 extra points on the test because he saw us all out front of the building studying and stuff before class started, which he’s apparently never seen before. It’s good stuff.

Tomorrow evening I’ve got a final in programming 1. Should go fairly well, I feel prepared. I have a study guide that is pretty much exactly what’s on the final so I’ll look over that tomorrow morning.  I have heard, however, that the average grade on it tends to be about a 60%. I need an 80% to get an A in the class.  It’s difficult because all the tests up until now have been practicals.  Writing out code, making sure it compiles, and making sure it does exactly what it is supposed to. The final is straight knowledge — multiple choice questions. 100 of them.  I’m slightly nervous because some of the questions are kind of tricky, they’re not necessarily mistakes I’d make in the code. I guess we’ll see!