I'm working on Winball, and then i've suddenly come to a sad conclusion:
I suck big blue…….. ice pops!…Alright seriously though - looking at it all, and the coding, and the MESS I've made, I think it's time to re-code most of the game from scratch.For those of you who were looking to do some critiquing, I'm looking to get in touch with you ASAP. It'll probably mainly be to see if there's any real way to salvage and/or re-work some of the code - at the worst, it'll be suggestions for better coding the engine once I re-do it.More or less, the only major problem is gameplay, really. The editor/level rendering engine is fine - at least as far as I'm concerned as someone else is helping with that… But as for me, I'm stuck with what I feel is a highly bloated game "engine" that is causing more and more problems.Right now, I've MOSTLY made everything from scracth, as I'm coming to it, using an original game as reference. I think I'm gonna re-outline it all, and then fully work on a way to map out the engine - including utilizing scripts fully to handle different things. That way, things will HOPEFULLY flow much, MUCH smoother…Anyway that's all for now.
Highly bloated engine, eh?
Time to get out the machete and hack away at the bits that aren't needed! Of course by that I mean, redesign the engine based on what will be needed rather than coding ad-hoc solutions. It can be a pain in the ass, but if you get it right, you will have a base that is robust enough that even if you do need to do encounter something you didn't plan for, you will be able to code it in without perverting the engine too much. Just take your time and think about what you are doing and it should work out fine.Or you know just jump insanely in with a machete, cleaving code in twain left, right and centre. That would probably make for a more interesting design document.Recoding is fun. That is all.
@Undeadragons By bloated, I mean there's excessive amounts of code, and everything I made went from my head to code. Which also meant a LOT of going back and tweaking code until I didn't get an error. I also got lazy with commenting, forgetting to comment here or there. As someone who is learning, it's a good idea to pretty much comment everything even if you don't need to, so I can remember more and more. At least that's how I'd learn.
I also have a decent amount of re-coding, and just in general nothing is being incredibly fun to work with now. Like, beyond what I'd be able to use. And then some bugs come up - making it nigh impossible to fix without hunting through code and possibly breaking something else.So I'll be doing a LOT of book work - designing the engine so I can mess with things. I might even invest in a few whiteboards.But ultimately I want to design a re-useable engine so I wanna try to compress everything into scripts and pretty much make it like a bunch of actions to use - the objects used would be fairly clean and not result in a mess of code.There's always the use of a machete.. but I don't want to cut up my monitor. :(@ Undeadragons
In most cases, paper is fine. However the ability to erase and modify on the fly (and cleanly) is good, and since everything is laid out in front of you, you don't have to sort through papers. I love whiteboards. :P And there's no mess like with chalk.As for streamlining. it will most definitely be a pain. The idea is to make something that can be modular yet strict enough to work just the way I want it - that way it can be re-used for multiple objects and/or different games. The idea is to drive everything I want to happen into a series of "functions" and scripts - much like the built in functions in GM. And re-coding will let me re-envision the code to work better, faster (maybe) and I can de-bug the current code without fear of breaking anything.