Home run!

This is how full I feel right now

I'm at home!  Finally!  I have (almost) no obligations now!  Well, except for work and chores and stuff.  But I'm finally home, and right now I'm way too freaking full.  Tomorrow I have to go for a run, shoulder injury or no shoulder injury.  I need to get back to working out.

Crippling self-image issues aside, I actually got a tiny bit done today, amazingly.  I had my youngest brother, Brian, playtest a game.  I gave him the controls and then let him play and tried to pick up on what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong in terms of the game.  This is one thing I actually learned at my year at DePaul was how to playtest your games.

You do what I just went through: set them down in front of your game, explain the controls and then don't direct their experience.  As much as you want to say "Look at this cool thing you can do!" you have to hold your tongue and see if they actually find that cool thing!  If they don't then you dun screwed up, and you have to go back to your design and see what can make this really cool thing
a) more obvious
b) more cool
or c) worthwhile.

Perhaps that really cool thing you made isn't actually cool and serves no purpose aside from soothing your ego.

not as awesome as first thought.

So that was an important lesson for me to learn.  I gained a few things from watching  Brian's playthrough: the access to turrets and mines was not considered a priority (this is the space-game that failed to actually be submitted... :(!  ) even though it was designed and thought out to be by me a rather critical element of game play.  So now I'm doing away with the two-click interface and instead switching to a one-button press method of purchasing turrets and mines that might make them as important to gameplay as I hoped they would be, and planned on them being.

I also fixed some dumb mistakes with my sprite object class (yet again) today.  On the agenda tomorrow: Doctor's appointment, come home, run and/or bike for at least and hour to work off all the crap I've eaten, come home, eat crap, play with Brian and work on the game.  I'm going to fiddle for this one for a while, mostly using it as a testing ground to find bugs and other issues (Brian actually helped me find one today.  I had made a major mistake with one section of my collision detection code that remarkably didn't show until I had 8 enemies on the screen (why 8? Who knows) but I also got that fixed too.

It basically was just the fact that I was checking pixel-by-pixel for collisions even when the sprite objects weren't close enough to even collide.  What you are supposed to do is take the bounding rectangles, or bounding circles or whatnot and see of the two image's easy-to-compute bounding shapes collide.

If they do, then check for pixel-based collision.  I knew that, and I had it implemented in all my collision detection methods.. except one!  I had just forgotten it earlier, so I went back in and fixed it up, now everything is running smoothly! HURRAH!

I will get back to the original game that started all of this, mine and David's project, now that we are both free and have time and all those wonderful things, but a side-project never hurt.  This project is no where I will build and tweak the rest of the Sprite Object class and test out some other "technologies" that may help us in the long run.  We shall see.

Oh yeah, I should go and comment everything so other human beings can use these classes and not just me..
hmmmmmmmmmmm...

TLDR

Until next time my fair lady(s) (and gentlemen)

- Kev