I Should be studying for a midterm right now...

And I am! ...kinda, I'm just multi-tasking.  Yeah! That's it, multitasking!

Pictured: Multi-tasking (?)

So after Easter weekend (which started out kinda crappy but ended well) I did a bunch of studying for my midterms, including the one I'm (supposedly) studying for now.  Ironically this midterm is for History of Games, which I would find a really interesting class if I wasn't worried I could potentially bomb the course.

I'm just gonna keep reusing this one for effect

While I really like the teacher for this course he's a little atypical, and as such I'm not even entirely sure what he wants to study or know for this midterm... even after posting a review sheet. Doncha' just love school?  I may have already said this in a previous post, but i find it very ironic that my schoolwork for completing a degree in video game design is getting in the way of my game design!

Speaking of game design, what progress has been made?

Comparatively little, I'm afraid to say.  David, being the brave soul that he is, is charging into the matter of C# garbage collection. to enable us to actually delete things when we want, as opposed to leaving tons of memory on the heap at a time until  C# feels it's an appropriate time to dump huge amounts at a time.

[LAYMANS TERMS: When I create new things in C#, bullets, enemies, etc, memory gets allocated to the "heap"  basically memory on your computer/phone/console that is free to be dynamically given out and taken away to objects.  In C++ managing your memory can be a pain in the butt, since every time memory is created on said heap it has no calling name (you must assign it a calling name) and as you are juggling these no-named objects around, you can be bound to lose a few in the code, resulting in memory leaks and eventually crashing of your lovely program/game.  C# does all this for you with something called a Garbage Collector which does a lot of fancy complicated stuff to make sure that you don't encounter memory leaks and the like and makes your program a better place]

So Garbage collector == a good thing, but not if i'm creating a bunch of objects at a time (and I am with bullets) so instead of dumping large amounts of memory at a time and possibly slowing down my game during the dumping phase, we are trying to dump the memory as the bullets are "deleted" in the game and delete them "for realz" at the same time.  We'll see if it's faster or just more of a hassle.  Hopefully faster, because I'd hate for David to go to all that trouble for nothing.  Though to be honest he is getting a much better sense of the underlying systems than I am!

What am I doing?  Fiddling, mostly.  I've made it now so that the enemies keep spawning and you can kill them (finally!), and tweaked some of the movment/shooting mechanics.  My next goal is to have enemies be able to bump into each other/the player and cause damage, and to upgrade the AI/movment.  Once I get my tablet (Tomorrow! I'm so excited!) I'll go back to the literal drawing board and animate the sprites some more and then add functionality onto the game that I had originally planned.

Oooh, I know, I know, what is it?  Well since you hardly even know the premise of the game yet, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to tell you.  I'll have a post sometime this week that lays out the basics without giving too much away!

This is not the premise of the game, but it would be awesome

I know this update is rather short, but I really have to go study now! I'm down to an hour and a half left of my evening out of 3-4 that I had!  Tsk tsk, tsk, I know, I know.

I'll get better at this, I promise!

Hmmmm... History of Chess... and Calculus.  Deep stuff man.

If anyone reads this, feel free to comment, ask questions or yell at me via teh interwebs and the comment thingy below!  If you feel compelled too, that is.  No pressure or anything.  I'm just looking for means to distract myself.

- Kev