Catching up

The following is a brief summary of the work I have done on my own and work that John and I have worked on together.

First off, I worked on some Java and made a "Hello World" program, a simple calculator, and something that took user input and displayed it in a string of text.

From there, I began the Hyperion Project (a text adventure), following the 3DBuzz.com tutorials for C# and XNA. I completed the first phase of the tutorials and had a working 'game' with four rooms, movable objects, a win condition and a lose condition. Using the things set up in the tutorials, a novice like myself could technically take it where I left it and make their own game with as many rooms, items, and win/lose conditions as they wanted.

This project was fairly simple, but had some more complex things written in it that I didn't understand, and some things I don't understand still. For example there was a text-wrapper that basically determined the length of the window, and made sure words wouldn't trail off the edge.

This is where John and I teamed up. We talked about it for a bit, decided we wanted to make games, and figured Hangman would be a good simple starter project. Here's what we ended up with.

Darn, and I was so close! This is by far the most complete project I have worked on so far, and I am proud to say we made it all ourselves. We didn't have a tutorial hold our hands, we didn't use stick figures (well, at the beginning we did), and it's fairly functional. Granted there are still a few things that don't function entirely as they should, but it's generally playable. John made the fantastic sprite artwork that the game contains using a variation of Paint, GIMP, and Photoshop.

Once I was done messing around with that project, I moved on to XNA basics, and was recommended a few tutorials. One site I decided to pursue was this one. I began with the simple breakout clone tutorials for XNA 4.0, and the tutorials leave you at this unfinished state of the game.

As you can see, the ball does not break the bricks, or interact with them at all. It just flies over them. This is because it lacks collision detection with the bricks. The collision detection between the ball and the paddle is functional. The user can use the keyboard's arrow keys or a Xbox 360 gamepad's directional buttons to move the paddle.

This helped introduce me to the XNA framework as well as sprites, drawing the sprites in the application, basic collision detection, and many other things I don't understand.

Then I went on to the tutorials for making an RPG in XNA 4.0 on the same site. These seem a little over my head, so I'm taking a break for now. I was basically copying and pasting code and not absorbing any of it. It's definitely something I'll keep at, but I've been avoiding it until I can understand it a little better.

And that's where we are today!