I announced earlier that I was going to make a tower defense game. And if you’ve been able to figure it out by the lack of announcements, I haven’t made it. But what I have made is a quite wonderful (imo) game engine/back-end for it.

But as I still haven’t come up with a satisfactory design for Ruby Tower Defense, the engine was wonderful, but of no use. So, in an odd spurt of enthusiasm, I decided to write Block Bounce again in less time, less lines, and less confusion, using this engine. And in doing so I discovered some hard-to-track-down bugs. All of these bugs happened to be in the engine…Making it very frustrating when you want to make a game, but have to fix a game engine while you’re at it.

So what I took away from this was, if your going to use a game engine, use someone else’s, because you can leave it up to them to focus on the engine, while you focus on your game. And if you must use your own, never trust it, for it will betray you as soon as you turn your back.

P.S. If your curious, I never did finish with that rendition of Block Bounce, but I did have a bit more than the core gameplay and menu system in about 250 lines (original has about 650)

Ah the strangeness of it all. Not too long ago I gave up making my game, Block Bounce. And now I’m reverting my decision. Why? Because I wanted to give my past self the finger I decided I really need to add another game to my “portfolio”. Also because giving up would be hypocrisy, I keep telling myself not to give up, keep going, its almost always worth it. And then I just blow that all away by quitting the development of Block Bounce. Sure the game is not very innovative, and there are thousands like it, but it would be my second completed game! And I had gotten so far…

So I will shout to the world, myself, and you: Don’t Give Up, Complete Your Game!

Here are 5 reasons you SHOULD rewrite your projects:

• You’ll have a better design the second time around
• It’ll take you less time to come up with something much better (from a developers point of view, anyway)
• Contrary to popular belief, you can keep most of the good code when you rewrite
• Rewrites can make your project less frustrating to code, less frustration == more productivity
• You may even have less intrinsic bugs!

As I was working on my game Block Bounce, I ran into many problems that I couldn’t wrap my head around. The solutions started off very complex, spanning many lines. These complex solutions would often fail, or only half work. As it turns out, every single time I had to do something like this, I could always find a simpler solution later on (that worked consistently too!).

Here are my tips for getting the simplest solution:

• If your implementing an effect, try faking it. Even though it may not be implemented in complete realism, it still looks just fine
• Approach the problem from as many angles as possible.
• Take a break. Sometimes just walking away, or just leaning back and closing your eyes can help you solve the problem faster.
• Never develop tired. You can’t think completely clearly and obvious solutions always seem to evade when you are tired.

Last night I was working on my level editor, and I got far enough to start loading sprites. And that’s when it hit me.

Why the hell did I make a spite editor!?

The library I was using (rubygame) can load 11 types of image files! Any paint program would have done the job…

The moral of the story is: make sure you have a good reason for making tools BEFORE you make them.

Hello All!

I’m a ways into my quest to learn OpenGL. I hit a particular snag when I started learning about textures. Let me explain: The tutorial I’m following had its own function to load in OpenGL textures, the problem was that, try as I might, I couldn’t write my own to do the same thing (oh the joys of a C++ tutorial when your using Ruby). I kept trying for days and days, and I couldn’t get it to work.

All this time I had known from a google search that SDL could load textures. I was stubborn wanting to try and do it myself (even after the 50th fail), I probably shouldn’t have tried to reinvent the wheel and just wen’t with loading textures through SDL

Until next time…