Day 9: 19 January 2013
10:28: In my previous post, I had said I needed to get a quick win. I got a win. It wasn’t as quick as I had hoped, but I got it. I wrote code to do plane/ray intersections. The code was easy enough (I’ve written very similar code before) but the hardest part was getting my unit tests up and running. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I wrote my first unit test on Day 9. It’s important to do.
At any rate, now that I’ve got it all working correctly (there were some configuration problems that were causing me the most issues) it should be much easier to add new unit tests as I go.
11:33: Thursday was a bad day for my and this game emotionally. Friday was bad enough that I chose to not work on it, and sleep/relax instead. (Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.) I’ll be honest, though. Now that I’ve ignored the grid that was causing me headaches, and I’ve gotten a couple of significant wins behind me this morning, I’m in a much better mood. If you’re struggling with your game, I’d suggest trying out the same thing. Give it a break and find something else that will result in a quick win.
The other part of this is that some time soon, I’m going to need to go back to the grid and face it again. I don’t know what will happen then.
1:42: I’ve been doing some cleanup/refactoring of my code to allow multiple screens in my game. Since I’m wanting to get a start on a second screen for ship design, I’m going to need this. Up until now, I’ve dumped most things in my main game class (it was once called Game1, but I’ve renamed it). For anything but the simplest games, you’ll want to pull out your code into other places, instead of dumping all (or even most) of it in that Game1 class.