Phase 2: Proof of the Pudding

After a busy phase of work (partly self-inflicted) in the first half of this year, I found myself again ready to get back to the project. I took stock of what I had done and what I still had to go. Then, like last time, I tried knocking off a TODO list.

This time, however, I tried to be a little more advanced in putting new features to the test. To have input fully working meant to be able to catch certain events in a particular way. It meant some substantial refactoring of my Engine façade at times, but I think the end result was worth it. Translating from SDL_Event to my own code may not have added much programmatically, but it was sufficient for what I wanted to do with it.

One thing I found when trying to learn how to use the SDL Input from websites, blogs, and vlogs, was that people would tightly couple the SDL_Input directly with their game. The very trap I was trying to avoid! Even the book I was using did it this way, which meant much of the implementation time was me trying to come up with the right patterns of implementation so that input would work the way I wanted it to.

What I started to do this time was analogous to test-driven development – as analogous as seeing things happen on a screen can be to explicit test cases anyway. I set myself particular outcomes I wanted to see, and used that as the driving point of design. To test my keypress feature, I wanted to be able to pause and resume music. This in turn exposed problems in my Audio class (not to mention what functions I exposed with the Engine façade), as well as problems with my Input class.

These use cases were a direct way of testing and expanding the capabilities of the engine. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't that much different to what I was doing earlier, but it was more directed this way. For example, I wanted to know how to play around with the alpha channel, so I set the task of gradually fading in the splash screen. To get it working properly required tweaking some fundamental code in the Render class, but I was able to achieve the effect this way.

There comes a limit to this form of development, however. One of the pressing tasks for the engine, and something I’d been putting off until I had more work fleshed out, was the question of how to switch from game coordinates to screen coordinates. The basic logic behind it isn't too complicated, though getting one’s head around it in purely abstract terms was difficult for me.

What was complex about the Camera, though, is that it couldn't happen in isolation. I needed to make a concept of a level, something the Camera would translate from. To have a level meant having a system of Tiles – the fundamental units that made up the level. Tiles themselves needed to have certain properties such as knowing who its neighbours are, or whether the tiles were square or hexagonal. Again, I found myself falling into The Grand Design trap, getting very excited about accounting for the possibilities and trying to get it right the first time. Again, the enthusiasm soon waned.

I found myself a month later trying to take stock of where I was, looking back through my documentation for some hint of what to do next, but I couldn't get the motivation back. Between work and stuff going on at home, I just didn't have the inclination to put in the work to pick up where I left off.