Game Developement and Coding

This week we had our first scrum sprint, meaning we set up assignments for each group member to be done with by Friday. The assignments were either art, music or code to be used in the game we are making, Dangerous Dander.

Being a coder my assignments were to start on the different classes of our game objects as well as their inheritance structure. That basically means I had to make so called Parent classes from which other classes will inherit variables and methods. This will save time when coding the rest of the game since I only need to make new classes inherit what they will need instead of coding it all over again for each new class created.

I did have some problems when coding the Parent classes though. I had to jump back and forth between them moving variables and methods around after realizing that I had misplaced something.

For example, to start off I had a variable related to collision detection on the Entity class from which most classes will inherit, including other Parent classes such as the Interactive Object parent class. The Interactive Object class is the Parent class that all objects that will be able to collide shall inherit from and so said variable was better placed in it rather than Entity. Having that variable in the entity class would mean even objects that aren’t going to have collision detection will inherit that variable as well, which would be wasteful.
This problem I consider to be a result of my own inexperience in planning code as well as coding in and of itself.

I also started working on overlap, collision detection and collision handling, in other words how different objects in the game will detect if they are in contact with one another and what should happen if they are.

My inexperience showed itself again as I was once again forced to move about certain methods and variables.

By Friday, however, I had managed to code everything I was supposed to. We now have a proper inheritance structure to use when creating more classes, as well as collision detection.  I have not been able to test it though as we yet don’t have anything playable to test things with. Once again inexperience shows itself as we probably should have at least a movable character in a rendered window to test collision etc. We need to remedy that as soon as possible next week.