Recent News

It has been nearly two weeks since the last update. Unfortunately not too much is new. However, in the past few days I have laid out more of the code and am going to try to focus on PPK more. Work and PPK is what I am going to live in breath for awhile. So expect some more updates a little more frequently.

Manager Project Intro

This blog has unfortunately been lacking updates so here is one!

Not more than an hour ago I finished programming what I am calling the 'manager project'. This project is a base game project and will work for nearly any 2D XNA game. This project, manages the game's audio, graphics (2D), input, storage, gamers (for xbox360), and scenes (like the title screen).

I use the term 'finished' lightly because I have yet to test it. However, much of this code was previously written a year ago for another project so it was a matter of porting it over to this new project and cleaning it up (mostly documenting). Fortunately, all of that code had been tested a decent amount.

Here is a class diagram of it (not all that pretty).


At the moment this project stands at about 3000 lines of code. Not too bad to start off with. I am sure that as Puni Puni Kingdom grows so will this project. My hopes for this project is that It becomes a strong foundation project for XNA games that I can use in my future games. There is also the possibility of this project receiving a public release if things go well.

Now I can get to programming the game specific code!

Laying The Code Foundation

I have begun to plan out the code for Puni Puni Kingdom. I have known that having a well laid out blueprint for the code makes development tremendously smoother, but I always seem to get too excited about writing the code. Usually, once I have a rough idea of what I am going to do I rush into it. This is bad because most of the time I end up with inefficient and poorly designed code.

So this time I am finally going to stick to it and invest some real time into building up the code's blueprint. Programming is not just about writing the code after all. I am finding that having this Game Design Document is proving to be invaluable in this endeavor. With it I am able to grasp everything that will make up the game and correctly translate the concepts into this blueprint.

One interesting part about doing this is that in order to completely layout some of the systems I have to do research about them first. This includes doing research for the AI, the weather (particle system), and just some good code design practices. I do enjoy reading about the good design practices, but I find the AI to be the most interesting. Fortunately for me, I took a course in AI and also had a little bit of reinforcement in a game programming course. There are several different avenues I can take for the AI and right now I am trying to plan that out. I am really interested in seeing what comes out on the other side since this is the first real AI system I will write.

A side note: I may post the UML diagram of the code once I finish it. I have a feeling it is going to be very large. Another feeling I have is that it will take awhile to actually complete it.