BlackHC’s Adventures in the Dev World

Today I’ve decided to work on BSS again - finally.

And I’ve even come up with a few neat bullet points to help me clean-up the codebase and I really feel like sharing them with the world today (although everybody can come up with them in a few minutes, too, but hey - now I can say that you’ve only copied my thoughts ):

How to fix and clean-up stuff quickly:

What do I want?

• remove unnecessary code
• clean-up the design
• untangle tight couplings

How do I do that???

Hack & Polish

• look at a specific code section
• rewrite it quickly while keeping the behavior the same
• don’t look at the overall design concepts - to KISS (to keep it simple STUPID)
• as soon as the new code actually seems to work, go and polish it slightly (to make it readable again)

Repeat these steps a few times..

Now look at the “overall picture” and try to identify common patterns and remove duplicate code again by writing generic helper code - but this time keep it decoupled and make it less messy!

Rinse and repeat…

OK… sounds great? Yes, it does! And it even works to some degree. I’ve tried it this evening and although I - like always - lose too much time browsing around and getting lost in the WWW, I still made some progress.

Here’s my worklog as proof (and to annoy Joshua a bit ;-P):

Enough for today. One more Dexter episode for me now (actually the first today) and then good night!

Good night,
Black

I’ve finally found enough time to write a few things about Shelled and put up a general Shelled info page and one describing my memories of its development. So if you’re interested you can take a look at it and tell me how you like them respectively how you like the game.
By the way its totally free and you can download the  game source and mod it, too, so if you haven’t tried it out, do now!

On other news I’ve been working on this and that and my GarageGames project still isn’t finished as I’m waiting for some artwork and I’ve been playing around with Doom 3 and Quake 4 (respectively their SDKs), maybe I’ll post a few screenshots in a few weeks. I’m still in a trial-and-error phase but I know what I want to do, so hopefully I’ll be able to create something nice.
There are also a few other projects and tasks that keep me busy: mostly school at the moment and preparing for my A-levels - though I’ve only started last week with that -, the second round of a computer science competition and other stuff.

Anyway stay tuned for more info soon.

Black

A lot has happened in the past weeks and I still can’t believe it. But first things first:

For the second time I take part in Germany’s federal computer science contest (for students): It’s called “Bundeswettbewerb Informatik” and consists of 5 problems(respectively 6 for teens aged under 16) which have to be solved in about two months’ time. Everything has been written, tested, coded in about 4 days (2 days in my fall vacation and 2 days on the last weekend before submission date). The code isn’t beautiful:

• It’s meant to be short, so it won’t waste too many pages when printed out.
• It’s meant to be simply and make use of libraries, so the documentation can be kept short and to the point (no need to explain sorting when STL already does it)
• It was hacked together in only 4 days with the last 2 days being spent in semi-crunch mode putting together as much as possible in as little time as feasible.

The documentation isn’t very good either, for the aforementioned reasons and I wrote all ~14 pages in 2 days, so there wasn’t much time to correct and proofread, but anyway you can download my submission here.

(BTW if you happen to be a corrector for BWINF and specifically happen to be mine, please note that I always exaggerate and am pessimistic, and my submission is pretty good after and I’ve taken it very seriously *nervous laughter*)

If it wasn’t for my job application at Splash Damage, of which I unexpectedly heard back four days before the final submission date of the contest, I would quite possibly not have taken the time to finish 4 problems in total, write some lousy documentation for them and send them off, but the motivation boost that the reply from SD gave me (or rather the prospect of it) was simply incredible. Now the answer to my application is a whole different story and I’ll tell it some other time.

On some other news Shelled! has finally been released Tuesday night and I’ve been playing it like mad online and people seem to enjoy it, too. I guess we can call it an success, even though there are still some minor bugs in the release build. But Joshua, the owner, founder - and my honorable master -please don’t lock me again in the coding room - of Red Thumb Games found a job/internship at GarageGames and has been busy since, so he decided to release (me and)  the current version of Shelled! for free instead of waiting another month or two until some kind of copy protection had been built in by us. 

Here’s a screenshot:

It looks neat, doesn’t it?
Download it from http://www.shelledgame.com and give it a try!

I’ll try to write a post-mortem soon and add it to my project page, but right now I’m busy with some contract work I got from GarageGames (thanks Joshua!) and I have already spent enough valuable time writing up this post.

So stay tuned and watch out for the fish,
 Andreas

Finally after 8 months of hard but fun work Sploidz is done and has been released by Red Thumb Games. I was the lead (and only) programmer for that project (David House did code the prototype, however) and I’m so proud to see it released and played by you!

Here check out this screen:

Weee, exciting, isn’t it?

If you want to find out more about the project, don’t forget to check it out in the project area or download it directly from http://www.sploidz.com.

Enjoy the game,

Andreas