Rise of the New Tutorials (RB's Entry)

Summary:

Status and goals for my entry into the competition. I'm being a rebel and using the competition to make more tutorials and finish my book, rather than actually making a game.

Rise of the New Tutorials (RB's Entry)

rbwhitaker 19 Aug 2015 04:34

So I've decided to use this competition as an opportunity to do a few things that I've been procrastinating on for months. I won't be making an actual game. (Well technically, I actually will be making a game or two. But not anything that I haven't done before, and not anything that will be particularly interesting.)

Guess that makes me a Rebel, officially.

I have 4 primary things I want to accomplish. That means roughly one per week, which I think is doable, if I focus on it. In the unlikely event that I finish it all early, and depending on if I pick up the game development bug from you guys in the first part of the month (that's a challenge to you guys!) I might see what I can do in the last week or weekend to make a game or some other game-related project.

Here are my four goals:

1. Finish the 2nd Edition of my book. The digital edition is already done. I have a few more formatting hoops to jump through for the print edition. It's a long story, and you've probably either (a) heard it already or (b) will hear it some day soon. I don't feel like I can work on much of anything else until it's done.
2. A ridiculously simple game-from-scratch set of tutorials. I'm thinking something like Pong, but is that too easy? I'd love to hear about something ever so slightly more complex as a starting point. Maybe Breakout? (Opinions welcome…)
3. A more involved game-from-scratch set of tutorials. For the second one, I'm thinking Asteroids. It's got some complexity to it, and gives me the option of doing a 2D and 3D game.
4. A set of tutorials on building a really simple UI. Nothing crazy, but enough to cover probably buttons, checkboxes, labels, pictures, radio buttons, maybe a slider, and basic layout.

If I can complete all of those, I'd call it a big success.

I'm also entertaining the possibility of doing another game-from-scratch tutorial set (not sure what, but something very different… maybe card based, or a simple RTS, or something). And I'm also contemplating doing some studying up on some pre-made UI libraries, such as this Empty Keys one that Liru pointed out to me in the forum.

Anyway… so that's the plan.

I'm hopefully going to be getting started on wrapping up the book stuff tomorrow. (So I guess that makes me a rebel in two ways.)

Other than that, I think I'm going to try to act like what I'm doing is making a normal game. So I'll probably do daily (or frequent) updates on here, and claim achievements, etc.

Schedule

Pre-Competition: Try to finish the book stuff, so the competition can mostly focus on new tutorials.
Week 1: I'm hoping to get the Breakout tutorials completely done by the end of the first week + first weekend.
Week 2: Depending on what I learn about how time consuming these tutorials are to make, I'll hopefully be able to move on to Asteroids in Week 2. (I know I used to figure about 4 hours of effort per tutorial, and I'm actually eyeballing about 17 tutorials for Breakout, giving me… 68 hours of effort. Ouch.)
Week 3: Simple UI tutorials.
Week 4: Some buffer space for the other tutorial sets spilling over their allotted time, or if everything goes well, perhaps I can make a game of my own during this last week.

Useful Links

My Trello board for the competition: https://trello.com/b/d6fO8M4v/competition-6.
The Breakout Preview code: https://bitbucket.org/rbwhitaker/breakout-preview/

Screenshots

Here are the latest screenshots of my progress.

Daily Log

In this section, I'll keep a daily log of what's happened. I do this partly for accountability. If I know people are looking for it, I'm far more likely to get stuff done and show what I've done. I also do it partly because I like seeing how far things have come over time.

Plans for Tomorrow

Tomorrow I'll finally start writing tutorials based on this game!

Day 5

I've got everything finished and cleaned up for the game. Tomorrow, it's on to the tutorials!

Day 4

I spent my day trying to fix a couple of bugs and eventually decided that it wasn't worth the extra math it would take to do it correctly, especially considering the goals of this tutorial set. So I went with a simpler but less correct approach at the end of the day.

Day 3

I've essentially completed Breakout, as the tutorials will cover. There are two things that I'm considering doing still.

• Music and sound effects.
• Making my collision detection code use a swept circle instead of just a circle.

I was originally going to skip the music and sound effects and just do that in the Asteroids tutorial, but I'm also nowhere near as far along as I had hoped I'd be at this point, and I think I might have to drop something. I think dropping a second game-from-scratch might be preferable to dropping the UI tutorial stuff that I was hoping to do. Any thoughts?

If I do drop it (temporarily, though let's be honest, it may be years before I come back to it, considering how long it's taken to get to it in the first place) then I think I might want music and sound effects added in, and maybe even some UI stuff. Make the game quite a bit more fully formed.

Day 2

I didn't get much done on Saturday. (I'm writing this Monday morning.) I've forgotten what I even did. I think a little bit towards breaking bricks. For a day off, it was actually rather disappointing how much I got done.

Day 1

• Created a project for a "preview" of Breakout. The intent is to have a project to use as a reference as I'm writing the tutorials. The final version may come out slightly different than the preview, but I don't want to spend four tutorials working down a path that I later discover didn't pan out so well.
• I got bricks drawing, and a paddle up and running, along with it being controllable with the mouse.
• Lots of bits and pieces of setup and framework.

Last edited on 26 Aug 2015 04:43 by rbwhitaker Show more

Re: Rise of the New Tutorials (RB's Entry)

scjohnson243 19 Aug 2015 12:36

As probably the least qualified "Game dev" here, I figured I would give you an opinion on some of the goals you have set. Coming from a DBA "Professional" background, and a very amature C# programmer (put together some windows forms a few times for very specific needs), and a LONG time game player (yes, I'm old) I feel like I could give you some possibly valuable input.

Goal1) Your book was the best C# book I read, and still my goto book when I need to figure out something, easy to read and good examples.
2) I have written a few very basic "games" in XNA when it was alive and kicking, and I could figure out things like pong on my own with the tutorials that are available on the web - however I did try to increase it to breakout, but could not figure out all the different changes that would be needed (Specifically collections of the "Bricks" and how to keep a running total of all bricks, thier hp, etc, etc.. This would be useful for a LOT of games, so if I were to vote, Breakout would get my vote - anyone can figure out the pong thing, because there are only a few basic things you need to know(movement, making the ball "bounce", etc. Breakout would add more.
3) Would love to do that, I have been looking at 2d just because it seems a easy first step, 3d scares me to death. I feel like something like astroids would be a good progression from a breakout type game, just because it uses about the same ideas, just in completely different setting (astroid position, direction, hp, etc instead of stationary bricks…)
4) seems like there is a LOT of tutorials out there (some good and bad) on building games, but menus/ui/etc I can never find any really good information on (Game states, I believe they were called last time I looked, I read enough to REALLY get myself confused and figured I would go back to them, and never did)….

Re: Rise of the New Tutorials (RB's Entry)

rbwhitaker 19 Aug 2015 13:46

alright, you've convinced me. I'm doing Breakout, not Pong.

I definitely agree with what you said. Breakout will teach you everything you'd get from Pong, plus enough other stuff to better justify it. I'll still try to keep the Breakout game as simple as possible. I'll probably leave off things like shaders, particle effects, and a UI. I'll probably only add some of those things in to the Asteroids tutorial. But this would still be quite a bit more involved than what I had envisioned for Pong.

I suppose if I have a lot of people who still have trouble getting in to Breakout, I can always go back later and add Pong as an even more basic starting point.

Re: Rise of the New Tutorials (RB's Entry)

Brett208 20 Aug 2015 14:39

RB,

I'm looking forward to the UI tutorials. I've been making menus for a while, but they have always been time consuming and complex, so excited to see what insights you share.

I'm also looking forward to the new book release.

-Brett

Re: Rise of the New Tutorials (RB's Entry)

rbwhitaker 22 Aug 2015 03:53

Day 1 update posted above. Like last competition, I'll just keep adding to the main post, rather than making a new post every day. On most (but probably not all) days I'll also post another update down here at the bottom stating that I've made an update. I'm trying to find the right balance between a cluttered forum thread, spamming people with emails, and forcing myself to keep moving forward by making daily updates.

Re: Rise of the New Tutorials (RB's Entry)

maximo3510 24 Aug 2015 12:38

Hi RB,

which software and platform do you use for this Breakout tutorial? I was bit away from programming (2-3 years) and I wonder if you are still using XNA or switched to monogame maybe.

Re: Rise of the New Tutorials (RB's Entry)

rbwhitaker 24 Aug 2015 14:31

I'm using MonoGame and Visual Studio 2015 for this, though XNA and MonoGame are so similar, I was thinking it would be easy to make tutorials for both.

I've personally still been using XNA for most of my projects, but MonoGame has come a long way in the last year or so, and they're finally catching up.

The reality is, the two are so similar, it's almost irrelevant (almost but not quite) which of the two you choose to work with.

I do think MonoGame looks like a better choice for the future, if you're just starting to pick something up. (Unity and SharpDX are also good choices, depending on your programming skills and what specifically you want out of your game, but I'd have to say I like the XNA/MonoGame route the best myself.)

Re: Rise of the New Tutorials (RB's Entry)

maximo3510 15 Sep 2015 12:59

RB, when printed version of second edition of your book will be available for purchase?

Re: Rise of the New Tutorials (RB's Entry)

rbwhitaker 20 Sep 2015 19:06

Very soon, maximo3510. I just uploaded what I believe to be the final version to the printer. It takes several hours for them to review it, but by tonight sometime, I think the 2nd edition will be available.

Re: Rise of the New Tutorials (RB's Entry)

rbwhitaker 22 Sep 2015 02:08

Well this competition didn't go the way I intended it to at all. I guess I was dreaming wildly when I thought I could do as much as I had planned out. Only a very small slice of that actually happened.

I want to blame it on work. Work got insanely busy a week or so into the competition. We're still trying to do everything we can to meet an important deadline by the end of the month. To say that work made it almost impossible to get the stuff done I wanted to wouldn't be a lie.

But I think to say so would be doing myself a disservice. If I answer honestly, I think I must admit that I lost my motivation to do what I had set out to do very early on, and that's the real underlying reason I didn't get much done. I tried to write tutorials, but they really… just didn't excite me. I'm not entirely sure I can quantify why. I don't think it is the writing. I actually really like the writing. I think there's something about the subject matter that just didn't strike my fancy over the last few weeks. I think a part of it was just that it is all really basic stuff that I've already explained elsewhere on the site. Sort of a been-there-done-that kind of thing.

I was talking in the chat room with Akantenshu on Friday or Thursday about all of this. We talked about how it might be better if I just made game-from-scratch tutorials in video form, which I'll admit seems a lot more exciting to me. Honestly, that's probably how I'll do it when I actually do it. (And I've been saying I need to do it for a very, very long time.)

So.

Where does that leave us?

Alright. So there's one big thing that I did actually do in this competition, and that was finish my 2nd edition of my book. Just 20 minutes ago, I pushed the Publish button. It doesn't appear to be on Amazon yet though. That seems to take 3-5 business days.

In the mean time, if you're antsy to buy the book, you can do so through the CreateSpace store (the printer) immediately. I actually get more of the profits when you do that (the printer still manages to take a good slice too) but it does limit your payment options. Here's the link for those of you who are interested: https://www.createspace.com/4884166

When I look back at the month, I can say that even though I didn't do what I set out to do, I feel like I'm still successful, with the release of the 2nd edition of my book.

Now I just need to figure out what to do next… Collab anybody? Competition #7?

Re: Rise of the New Tutorials (RB's Entry)

Emblis 22 Sep 2015 08:16

Cheers mate, good work with the book! You will get the rest done some other time :D