Exectuable Ready

I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted. My crazy schedule finally caught up to me, and I felt like I was going to lose my mind a few times. Recently I found time to continue working on the game and finally got an executable ready to go! It's nowhere near perfect, the ship movement could use a lot of work, and animation and sound effects would be nice.

http://cassietorda.com/catrinatorda/?page_id=4

Ship Movement Complete

Alright so I finished redesigning the ship movement. The up arrow works like an actual thruster would. When pressed, the ship starts moving that way. If the ship changes directions, activating the thruster again, the ship will slowly start moving in that direction. It was quite a challenge getting the ship moving like this.

For everything else I've done so far, I was able to think of the design in my head and implement the code. If it didn't work, I just had to make little changes. But for the ship movement, I felt completely lost. I actually made a text document to write out my ideas and analyze them after I wrote them out. This really helped me see flaws in my design (with the help of the debugger). I kinda felt rushed to start and finish this project, so I didn't do a lot of pre-planning. Now I regret not documenting my past ideas and not planning this out. I think it would have saved me a lot of time.

I also realize my code is very unorganized, so after I get the front-end looking OK, I'm going to fix the organization of the code. I also want to create text docs to explain what each class, function and variable are for.

Here's an updated to do list:

• Have meteors break into smaller pieces, twice
• Recreate meteors once all are destroyed
• Get the "lives" displayed on the screen
• Fix bullet - meteor detection
• If time permits, add high score system
• Create documents to explain code
  

I'm Back!

Its been a long week, and I haven't had a lot of time to work on this, so I'm so glad I actually accomplished something tonight. I decided the next thing to complete was the movement of the ship, which was trickier than I thought. I had to increase the acceleration of the ship when the thruster was activated, and then had to make it continue moving in that direction for a set time depending on how long the thruster was going for. I didn't finish all those things, but I did get the acceleration down, and it continues to move after the up key is released. So now when I press up, the ship starts moving. The longer I hold the up button, the faster the ship gets... and the ship never stops moving..... But now I'm getting a lot of vector errors =(. I'm going to complete the movement of the ship, then examine and fix the errors. Here's what the error looks like:


And a short term To-do list for ship movement:

• Calculate a certain amount of time for ship to stop moving
• Decrease acceleration as time goes on
  
• Change ship direction change to not so sudden

I think I'm missing a few things but I'll discover them next time.

I had been feeling a little down whenever I thought about how much I hadn't gotten done this week. It made me feel like a failure. Maybe it was the push I needed to really sit down, clear my thoughts and think about what I had to do.