July 12th, 2009 by Boon

Coming Along...

Things have been moving a bit slowly. I just had 3 weeks off work, in which time I hoped to finish the editor. Unfortunately, I didn’t hit that milestone, but I did make a lot of progress. While the first few months of this project were spent learning XNA and getting myself up to speed not only with C#, but also with the basics of programming design patterns and working up a bit of an understanding of good programmatic flow and structure, moving over to a WinForms application has presented a whole bunch of new challenges. Like trying to decide if this was really a big fat stupid idea :/

Motivation has been a bit off. I spent a lot of my 3 weeks holidays finishing Dead Space and Grand Theft Auto 4. Very productive. I also had regular visits to my dentist, who was kind enough to prescribe me $2500 worth of dental work, on top of the multiple ‘consultations’ that cost me $400 all up for him to stick his fingers in my mouth and say “hmmm” a lot. WUT?

It’s not that I haven’t felt productive with this WinForms thing, it’s just that it was a whole bunch of new challenges and I kept running into roadblocks that would completely stall me to the point of disinterest. I haven’t given up, though – just not worked as diligently on getting this done as I intended.

It’s pointless to rant about whether or not I should be programming a game engine when I barely know how to program. It’s the path we decided on, and for the most part, it’s moving forward. Slowly, but slow progress is still progress. But throwing WinForms into the pile has complicated things a fair bit. The functionality of the editor is there – the user can draw collisions and sprites, and add predefined actors to the game stage. What’s missing is the relationship between the editor logic, and the interface. Besides the problems of designing a good, clean, functional interface (I redesign the interface every time I add a new button), figuring out how to wire everything up so that the winform logic is clean and easy to manage is where I’m at. And it’s surprisingly complicated.

One blessing: There’s a lot more information available online for winforms development than for XNA related stuff, so I’m rarely short on resources.

Despite the slightly pouty tone of the post, I’m happy with where we’re at. I would have liked to have been here faster, but the fact we’re here at all still astounds me. If anything is going to prove to be the perfect motivation, it’s going to be the fact that I announced “I’M GOING TO PROGRAM A GAME AND A GAME ENGINE!” without any programming experience purely to shame myself into staying on target.

Shame that doesn’t work when it comes to cleaning my house.