Adarakion Developer Diary: Issue 43

I feel like I have been up and down more than a kangaroo on a trampoline this week. It’s been probably one of the more productive weeks in terms of coding, whilst (as I mentioned last week) we are now at the Alpha stage, what has been interesting is getting feedback from a few people who haven’t actually played the game yet – most noticeably Phil. Phil’s computer doesn’t have all the development libraries on it so its been a good test to see if the game actually works without all the other stuff that we all have, does it?

The answer is yes, but with a few glitches – some of which were stupid mistakes like me leaving test code in, others, the dreaded memory leaks, were less obvious!  Memory leaks are REASONABLY easy to fix by essentially freeing up any memory used in the game once the game shuts down (and also keeping that same memory as free as possible during the execution of the game).  We started out with a LOT of leaks, and now we have managed to reduce that to quite a few!  I think it’s fair to say when I saw Phil’s list of “initial” bugs my heart sank.  I thought we had a game which was finished, ready for release which would storm the world!  I knew a few of the issues which we needed to sort, but perhaps wasn’t quite ready for the big list chucked at us by Phil.  What I do take away from this is a concept of “code blinkers” (that’s Copyright Adarakion Games 2010 by the way).  What I mean from that is that when developing its easy to, not so much get carried away, but forget about the gamer who will be actually playing your game. This manifests itself in two ways:

1. Whilst a feature might LOOK really cool and you might be impressed with yourself for coding it, doesn’t mean that it’s going add anything to the game or make the game any more interesting to play, so test things and think objectively.
2. Whilst something may work fine on the development PC it might not on someone else’s, so even if something is running as intended, make sure that you stick to the conventions of memory management and ensure that the code is slick and efficient.

Overall however it’s been a great learning experience, and it’s taught me that I need to be more efficient with my code, I need to clear away stuff I don’t need anymore and remember to get rid of it completely when I’m done with it.  It’s quite interesting how my personality is reflected in my code!  I’d describe my style as “organised chaos” with emphasis on the chaos and less on the organised!  I’m finding it interesting how, through this whole experience, I am still learning things about myself.  It’s probably fair to say that whilst I was aware of these personality traits I did little to reign them in and control them!

My plans for this weeks diary were to formally announce Project 2 and start getting you chaps involved, but as with everything that has gone slightly by the way side. We are waiting for some news which means we aren’t quite ready to do a big (well, I say big, I mean big from our perspective of course) announcement yet.  A bit of a shame, but I’m sure someone once told me that the best things come to those who wait. Oh yeah. That was Liam, or that bloke from the Guinness adverts.  Either way, they knew what they were talking about I’m sure!

So no announcement yet – but it will happen, just as soon as we are able to bring everything together properly and also have the background stuff to prop it up a little (such as websites etc).  Speaking of websites, Phil has been hard at work revamping our own website along with doing some project specific site stuff too – have to say that it’s looking really awesome at the moment and that’s something else I can’t wait to share with you all.

Next weeks diary will be written by another member of the team, so I will see you in a couple of weeks, hopefully with some proper news rather than this hairy fairy evasive stuff!!