I slacked off for a week writing a blog, so this post actually represents two weeks of work. However, I can say that if there seems to be a lot done, it's not just because there is two weeks of work involved. By the second week, I realized I was on the home stretch and did a lot of work. This will be the last blog post I forsee for CBI.
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The bug I encountered last week was a deep one. Somehow, the game would move the player and AI objects when they are supposed to be stationary, and it appeared to be associated with the UI's button objects I was using. I say "appeared" because I really don't know what the source of the problem is. I spent a whole work night trying various ideas to figure out what was wrong, where the problem lay, or whether I could somehow ignore it. Sadly, every effort to try to thwart the bug, or even just figure out what was causing it, failed. To this day, I still don't know why my game was behaving the way it was.
Last week ended on a bum note, with a game that did not seem to be any fun, begging the question, "Why continue?" I continued anyway, and I'm glad I did. Unfortunately, though, this week ends on a bum note as well.
One thing I've learned in the process of developing my game is that there will be features that I am just not looking forward to adding because I know they will be more complicated than anything else I had added up to that point. However, these are the features that my game absolutely must have. By requiring that I work on my game every night, I force myself to confront these challenges and discover that I can in fact surmount them. And when I do, my game becomes so much better.
I think I was being somewhat optimistic when stating that I would have a prototype working by this week. I do have a tendency for optimism that I find hard to check. I am nowhere near a working prototype, but this does not bother me. I have managed to keep to a more important goal: working on my game every night for at least an hour, even if this does not involve any coding. For now, I would much rather develop the habit of working on my game than worry about where I am in its development. My strategy for motivating myself to keep working has been to think of one task I believe I could accomplish by the end of the night, be it adding a new feature or resolving some bug, then make it a goal to complete that task. These little goals keep me from being swamped by what is likely to be the biggest game project I have attempted to date, and what I believe could be a good game that challenges my programming abilities and, even better, is completely mine from concept to completion (and hopefully it will be fun too).
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AuthorCurtis Miller is an instructor and graduate statistics students at the University of Utah. Archives
June 2016
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