08-02-2018
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This first blog post will be about how I as the lead programmer choose to implement movement into our game. For some context: the game me and my fellow team members are working on will feature loads of different sprites that move around. The player will be one of them and the others will be different types of enemies and pickups. In order to simplify the code and write as little duplicate code as possible, I choose to make all my moving game objects as children of the class ”MovingObject”. This parent class will have all the necessary variables and functions in order to move the object in whichever way I want it to. The specifics for how it will move will depend on the child object. For example, the Player class specifies that the values ”horizontal” and ”vertical” will change depending on keyboard inputs (in this case the W, A, S and D keys). The values ”horizontal” and ”vertical” are then used in the ”Move” function in MovingObject. One other big reason for this is for my own programming experience. As a relatively new programmer, I wanted to use as much as possible of my new found knowledge from last semester in this project. Before starting on this project my team had a small talk about our personal goals for the project. We all stated that we wanted to use this project as a giant experiment in preparation for tackling the next project and with that, the biggest event of the year: Gotland Game Conference. We wanted to use this experience to learn as much as possible and to do everything wrong now, instead of later. It may sound like we are not taking this project as seriously as we maybe should, however, that is not the case. We still want to make the absolute best product we can! And as for what this all means for me as the lead programmer I wanted to make everything as professional as possible. I know that it sounds ambitious (and maybe a tad bit pretentious…) but with this huge learning possibility I don’t just want to learn, I want to learn the correct way. The structure for movement with all its children is a humble start on this road to programming expertise.
That’s it for now, tune in next week for the update on whether or not we made our alpha goals!  |