2-Week Analysis: Greatest Obstacles So Far?

2-Week Analysis: Greatest Obstacles So Far?

rbwhitaker 24 Feb 2014 19:43

At two weeks into the competition, everybody has probably by now had some sort of problem come up. Perhaps it was with finding time to program, perhaps you made a big error in your design, perhaps you had a bug that took forever to resolve.

Post here, and commiserate with everyone else here who has experienced the bumps that come naturally with game (or any software) development!

(There's also another thread about your Greatest Victory to-date as well!)

Last edited on 24 Feb 2014 19:44 by rbwhitaker Show more

Re: 2-Week Analysis: Greatest Obstacles So Far?

rbwhitaker 24 Feb 2014 19:49

For me, the greatest problem I've faced is just simply (A) finding time to do game development and (B) not wasting it when it comes up. I've seen how easily I get distracted with this thing called "The Internet", bouncing from page to page doing things that have only a tiny bit of usefulness.

The thing that has helped this the most for me is when I hit my little Chrome add-on that runs for 25 minutes and blocks certain pages on the Internet for the duration. Even that's not perfect though. I still manage to find ways to waste time.

One thing that would probably help is to go back in and fine-tune the sites that are blocked. Perhaps I should even try out the version that blocks all sites except ones in the list, so the default is to not allow it…

Re: 2-Week Analysis: Greatest Obstacles So Far?

Swatacular 25 Feb 2014 03:58

My greatest problem is finding a Way to get the "work time" to program.. As I consider Programming "learning (aka Schoolwork)" but I am always busy doing real work operating machinery and several other various manual labor jobs that keep me away from my computer..

Re: 2-Week Analysis: Greatest Obstacles So Far?

PiscesMike 25 Feb 2014 07:19

If you've been following my posts (or listening to me grumble in IRC chat) then you'll probably already know my biggest problem for the last two weeks was caused by trying to avoid a little bit of hard work. I had it in my head that recursion was a bad thing, and a pain in the butt to get correct. I guess it doesn't help that my most recent experience with recursion was in C++, and on top of that, it was folder and file recursion. If you've ever dealt with strings in C++ and being able to strip, organize, and build a path for recursion out of that, you'll understand when I say that there was blood leaking out of my ears from my brain melting.
As it always is, my fears far outweighed the amount of effort it actually took to solve the problem. I basically spend about 4 work days trying all kinds of corrupting nested loops and chasing down unsolvable errors. Or at least, errors that could have been avoided by tackling the issue in the correct manner. 10 minutes into the recursion, the whole class was working b-e-a-utifly.
Other than this self imposed roadblock, the only other issues I've faced is fleshing out design items. I'll get a good picture in my head of how things are supposed to look and feel and dive into fleshing out some graphics, but don't actually spend enough time considering how they are going to work. So, in a sense, the game looks better than it actually is.
That being said, I'm going to spend week three on the 'encounter' state. This is where you're going to be fighting the aliens in something that looks like the original space invaders. If things work out, there will be upgrades of various types and the ability to build different ships for resource gathering, etc. I may have bitten off a little more than I can chew for this particular time frame, but I'm going to give it my best shot. At the least, you'll be able to travel around the galaxy fighting aliens and ridding the universe of their scum!

---

"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets

Re: 2-Week Analysis: Greatest Obstacles So Far?

Marcus42 26 Feb 2014 00:25

I haven't really had a whole lot of setbacks, but the biggest one that keeps coming up is not making the EnemyManager class properly. I didn't have the foresight to make a List, Array, or whatever, that stores the x and y location of each enemy, and instead drew them using something like this:
for (int numberDone = 0; numberDone < 21; numberDone++)
{
if (numberDone < 7)
{
spriteBatch.Draw(enemyTexture[numberDone], new Vector2(5 + (numberDone * 100) + xLocation, 10), Color.White);
}
else if (numberDone < 14)
{
spriteBatch.Draw(enemyTexture[numberDone], new Vector2(5 + ((numberDone - 7) * 100) + xLocation, 100), Color.White);
}
else
{
if (numberDone < 21)
{
spriteBatch.Draw(enemyTexture[numberDone], new Vector2(5 + ((numberDone - 14) * 100) + xLocation, 190), Color.White);
}
}
}
It's worked out fine, because there are ways to calculate the x and y of each ship even when using this method, but it's been a big inconvenience. I could go back and change it, but by now there's so much code depending on it using this method, it's not worth it.

Anways, this has probably been my biggest problem, aside from not having much time to program over the week.