Maybe I’m just disoriented, gazing up at the epic hulk of code to which I was so devoted.

Maybe it’s because using the SVN Eclipse integration makes it hard to skim through my classes quickly.

I do not envy whoever has to maintain that. The worst part is, when I wrote it, I was so full of piss and vinegar thinking that it was so well engineered. Yikes. I better work twice as hard to make it even more obvious what I’m doing now so that Rob-of-the-future won’t resent me.

Meanwhile, I finally figured out how to get Thingle working! I think my week’s goals will involve mostly tidying and Thingle experimenting. Probably won’t get to reviewing it until I spend some more time with it.

First thing I realized is that it’s easier to make a promise-list at the beginning of the week than a ‘what I did this week’ post. I’m not sure if that makes more sense or not. I’ll try it out this way to see how it feels. It’s also nice to reflect on what happened this week. I’ll just keep calling weekly posts ‘weeklies’, and I hope something consistent eventually congeals. Might be ‘goals’, ‘intentions’, ‘progress’, or ’snivelly excuses’. We’ll see!

Second thing, I am no longer totally happy with my normal blog approach, which is kind of like a great big rant about something. Somewhere in there, my train of thought changes so I change the title, only to realize that I didn’t have a point in the first place! I think I’m becoming self-conscious, having passed a thesis. I might compromise quantity for quality and actually… outline and draft! I think it would improve my writing and hopefully your interest in reading. I caught myself being self-chastised for not summarizing the whole post in the ‘before the break’ section of my blog posts.

Terraflubbery

• Review Thingle, the Slick GUI toolset
• Reponder some Space Fortress design decisions (roguelike roots)
• Draw attention to the fact that ‘reponder’ does not set off the spellcheck underlines
• Find a better theme, fight urge to roll own

Code

• Space Fortress: Tidy up code (comments up to snuff)
• Space Fortress: Document code some more (it looks like crazy to me, maybe my old docs still work)
• Space Fortress: Fight urge to make serious changes to it at the moment!

Space Fortress is full of elements which are more conveniently displayed as text in a traditional GUI. There are so many elements that I don’t think I could have gotten away with a quick HUD. Maybe that’s bad design, but I should be able to finish badly designed games before attempting to polish turds.

I call this HUD not GUI

There are two parts of the GUI, one I am rolling myself (clicks interacting directly onto the rendered game scene, for selecting units and ordering them), and the other which is for the windows floating above it all telling you more than you need to know. I call the windowy one the ‘GUI’, despite any interaction with a graphical game would happen in the GUI. I call the other stuff HUD, I need better terms.

This is the stuff I call GUI

A little over a year ago, I chose SUI, a lightweight GUI package for Slick. It looked good and worked well, but was still in a bit of an alpha stage of development. As I blew the dust off of the old Space Fortress code, I realized that this lib hadn’t progressed since I left it almost a year ago. I don’t like depending on a lib if it isn’t being updated anymore, unless it’s scratching every itch already.

So a new one I’m trying out is called Thingle based on existing tech, brought to Slick by the unstoppable hero of Java Game Development, Kev. This ones seems to be a more extensive, skinnable wrap of Swing (I might be wrong, but it has the standard widgets), but fancies an XML widget layout tool. Great!

Sadly, before I play with the new lib, and (hopefully) decide to integrate it, there is a lot of slop in my existing code I have to tidy up. I could tell where I was so interested in prototyping something, that I did something the wrong way leaving a comment informing future-me that it was inelegant. There is also a design issue to sort out, too. The issue of tile-versus-pixel based movement. I will discuss that another day.

Retrospectively, these posts are likely boring unless you’re me. I think I can do better. Even by promising to add figures to the dry posts. Kids like animated GIFs!

So, first, an overview of Space Fortress. The title (like all the titles) is just a placeholder to remind me of its Dwarf Fortressian roots. The stuff I liked about Dwarf Fortress was the freedom to build just about anything, setting up a little system, hoping for the best. It’s a great toy and I follow its development religiously. I just thought it would be fun to make a much more light-weight, arcadey version of it. It would have a better UI, and allow shorter games.

The concept is that a you have a little spaceship containing an industrious spaceperson and maybe a few little ro-bots lands on a barren planetoid. It is your job to turn the rock into a profit! Maybe you mine out all the gold and sell it. Or maybe it’s full of precious irontanium, you can build a refinery or some factories and produce widgets! Perhaps you can set up a little terraforming operation, and then turn it into a luxury resort planet. It all depends on what resources are on the planet or what your assigned goals are. Of course, the imagination runs wild, thinking about setting up star systems, figuring out supply/demand, pirates, political stuff, etc… which would affect goals and events. Oy! What I liked about this game was that if I built a solid little kernel, I could always pick away at it SOMEHOW, or when I learned a new trick, somehow integrate it.

I decided to make a proper design document. But, I couldn’t find any templates I agreed with (possibly due to no experience with them), so I tried some kind of ‘user stories’. Each little story would be an isolated little interaction. After sketching them out, I would implement them. And it worked! My design documents are in the produce section. I managed to hammer out the ‘mine stuff’ story, and implement it. It was glorious! Since the game plays like an RTS, but side-view, its easier to use some of the ideas coming from the productivity software world, where widgets are similar.

My problems started when I forgot what I told myself. Make a solid little kernel that is fun, then start adding stuff. The exact moment of my downfall was when I made the mistake of looking at an anthill. I realized to my horror that dirt had to come out of the hole! All of a sudden my precious mining system had to have a ‘pull dirt out of the ground’ mechanism. I should have just said ’space vapourizers turned dirt into air’, but I got really tied up and angry at making dirt fall, clumping it together into piles, figuring out how to build piles of dirt on the surface.

I want to come back to this one, I still have the repository, but before I think I need to adjust my trajectory. DF is great and sprawling, but if you look at his development site, you see that he dumped out all his thoughts years ago into enormous bullet lists. Then (get this) he considers the best way to do them in little clumps. He realizes that wishlist items 22,53,144 all involve such-and-such, so he’s logical about it. Maybe if I had sat on ‘rock collection’ a little longer, I would have realized that it could have waited, and maybe I could have taken out many rocks with one stone!

So, my lessons seem to be “keep it simple until you have something cool and working”, “give fancy new features proper cool-down time”, and “clump fancy features together”.

• Set up the Terraflubb blog
• Got two projects pages up (Space Fortress and Tinyroidvania)
• Totally got a comment (Ian FTW!)

Next up:

• Frank post-mortem for Space Fortress
• Find a better word than ‘post-mortem’, something like ‘post-stasis’ because they aren’t dead, just sleepy
• Add doodle gallery
• Add Horror Mansion project page

After a less-than-optimally productive year, I’ve been thinking I want to properly embrace the things I enjoy doing. In particular, game development. I always enjoy the creative acts of art, design, and programming, but I’d like to finally get a little game finished which might provide somebody with an hour of entertainment.

Suddenly, a purpose as returned for a blog-like setting. I hope that keeping a log of my progress (screenshots, sketches, and bébé demos) will provide me with some perspective. I’ll be uploading all the old stuff I’ve done that I can find, no matter how embarrassing the old stuff is.

So, hello!