Mid-December Already?
Fast Month Huh?
Every day since Thanksgiving has felt like a blur to me. Not to say that I’ve been doing nothing. Quite the opposite, in fact. I have been working a lot on my bullethell game and it is coming along nicely. To be honest, I did not expect to work this much on it, but I am enjoying it and i feel like I am progressing on it. I still have a lot to do, like adding more enemy fire patterns, stages, music and maybe dialog but I am focusing on a stage system using JSON for now. This project is teaching me a lot of skills that are transferable to other aspects of software and game design.
Outside of ze bullethell
I have still been using and writing a lot of C. For example, I have been writing and testing memory allocators like pools and arenas. For any self-respecting programmer, it’s crucial to understand memory and the potential bottlenecks of a solution even if that solution is ingrained deeply in the dogma surrounding your field. Take pure OOP, for example, which is super nice for programmers at first because it lets you think about your data like real-world objects. However, under the hood, many real-world examples of OOP usage can lead to memory fragmentation and unmanageable inheritance trees. Now am I saying OOP is useless? No, not in the slightest, I just feel that every programmer should understand his or her tools and learn the alternatives when needed. With that said, if you were to look at me for the bullethell, you’d notice fragmentation and potential leaks in my enemy and projectile manager classes, which I do plan to address using pooling. That’s all for now. Have a good week.