The other day when I was busy working on some updates to Turt’s Adventure I noticed a comment I made at the top of a header file. I was keeping track of the date I created the class and then I was making note of when I made changes.

First off, I don’t do that any more an I’m happy for that because I’m constantly re-writing sections of code as I learn how everything fits together. Turts Adventure is what I would consider my second game development project so I still have lots to learn and sometimes the best way to learn its to try something and learn why its not a good idea.

The part of that comment that really struck me was the year. I started the class in question in September of 2003… 2003!! I’ve been working with the same code for over 6 years. Now, its not like I’ve been working on it all the time, I’ve taken breaks that have probably been at least 2 years long, but I keep coming back.

Hopefully with the progress that I’m making this time around I can see it out till the end. I can definitely see how what I have now can actually become a game so that should keep me motivated. The goal at this point is to finish the game and have it available for Linux, Windows and hopefully Mac. Then I will look at what platform I want to port it to, at this point I’m thinking iPhone or XBLIG. At this moment XBLIG is winning because I can probably get started in that area without dropping alot (or maybe any) cash.

I think the game is really progressing well. The only thing that I would have to note is that I’ve got a lot different features started right now but most of them are going to need to be polished as development continues.

For example, I have projectiles mostly working. The player is able to shoot projectiles that currently shoot straight out from the player until they connect with a wall and then they are removed from the game. They will also cause damage to NPCs.

That sounds great but we are missing a bunch of features:

- Projectiles don’t have any information for what they look like so they are all represented as an apple, this problem is also shared with items.

- I need to add the feature for the returning projectile, so that once it hits an object it will return to the sender.

- Projectiles should also pick up items during flight (maybe only certain types). Which means it will need to have its own payload inventory.

- A player can currently send out millions of projectiles so NPCs are no match. Throw rate and Ammo. levels need to added to control this.

- Along with above, a player should only be able to send out projectiles when they have the correct weapon type selected. However, weapon types are not created yet so that opens another can of worms.

I’m sure there are more things that I haven’t listed but you get the idea, and projectiles are not the only thing that is currently on the go.

I have an inventory screen, doorways for moving from map to map, and some NPC AI things currently in development. There is a lot of development left to go, but I can definitley start to see how all of this code could be turned into an actual game at some time.

Next Steps:

Once I get some of the things I have on the go cleaned up, I need to focus on how I’m going to load the maps. Currently everything is hardcoded which could stay while the game remains small, but once I get into large maps with a lot NPCs and Items its going to get very complicated very fast.

I thought I’d post another update on the progress. Again the game hasn’t really changed at all in the last little while, at least in terms of functionality. What I’ve been working on is removing the code that was hacked together to get around design problems.

I used to have a header file that I called Global Functions, this was set-up to hold any functions that really didn’t have a home, I would send them tons of data and they would do the processing. It worked but it was messy. I have now completely removed the need for this header file.

Now I’m working on a base class for game items. All the objects in the game now have a location set and a collision area, I’m now creating a class that all other object types will extend so I don’t have the same code over and over for each object type. I think this is going to end up taking a little while because its going to change a lot of variable and function names.

Projectiles are still likely going to be next on the list, I’m planning to have 2 types, arrows (just goes straight out until it hits something) and boomerang (goes out a certain distance before turning around. I also need to work on setting up a system to get from room to room. Then I can start working on a game map which will help for a game Demo.

Vertigo Room. This is just a little map change I made to make it easier to see where things are on the map. The code clean-up is going very well, the player is now correctly blocked by all blocking surfaces. The code is also ready for many more add-ons now.

I just got back to the game after letting it sit for a while, it seems like the development is going to happen in fits and spurts, but I guess that is fine since its only a hobby project. If this project gets released it will be awesome but for now I’m having fun working on it.

The look of the game really hasn’t changed since I last posted a screen shot so I’m not going to post one now. (Well that, and currently the code doesn’t compile) What I have been working on is cleaning up the code.

First I revisited a problem I was having with circular inclusion of classes. Basically I wanted the Map or Room class to know about all the items contained in the room, but for the path-finding code I wanted the player to know about the room. This wasn’t working for me, but I have found a trick that helped solve this problem. What you need to do is just define the class name in the header file instead of including the header file. Then your limited with what you can do in the header file but you just do the rest in the source (cpp) file. I may come back to this issue again in a while because in my research I found that a better way to go about this would be to create a PathFinder class and give that class only the information it needs to do the path-finding. The way I have it now the player know EVERYTHING about the room and all that is contained within, which is overkill to say the least.

I am also trying reduce the number of parameters I’m passing around so I’m creating some easy to use structures and classes for things like location co-ordinates, and collision boundaries. For example instead of having 2 variables for player location (player_location_x and player_location_y) I’ve wrapped them together making it easier to pass the information around.

Finally I don’t know why I thought the collision detection was working but it was clearly way off, I played around with it for a day or 2 and now I have it complete and very strict. There was a lot that wasn’t step up right, however most of it was linked to my collision area not being defined correctly.

Next Steps…. Finish Clean-up and then I think Projectiles would be fun