Elysian Shadows

So, I'm the only programmer on my team of two. The other guy is a long time friend of mine who is handling art and is co-designing with me; he thinks I'm a masochist for liking this whole coding dealio (and hes right).

I'm curious as to how other lone wolf programmers deal with design (from a programming perspective) without anyone to bounce ideas off of.

Just solo it and figure things out yourself? Try to abstract away from programming concepts to something more general?

I'd really like to discuss how we want to break up our game idea from a OOP standpoint but, it would all go straight over his head if I started using terms like class, inheritance, encapsulation, etc.

Just wanted to hear other peoples thoughts.

Edit: can't spell

Do what I do:

Toss your ideas around right here on the forums and let all these wonderful programmers pick it apart to nothingness and help you make it PERFECT.

Kros wrote: he thinks I'm a masochist for liking this whole coding dealio (and hes right).

Friends(especially artist friends). they just don't get it do they?

as for having someone to bounce my ideas off, that would be super, but i'm not aware of anyone who I know who knows how to program in C/C++ and has actually heard of SDL, let alone use the thing...

Gosh I reckon my mate used to think I was a complete arse when I would tell him to draw some 40x40 sprites in .PNG and then he would come back with 50x50 in .BMP and I would proceed to tell him why I couldn't use them...

Kros wrote:Edit: can't spell

Dude get, Mozilla Firefox it has a automatic spell check... i use it... im just a lazy ass(to stuburn to admit i spelled something wrong) and don't change the things even though it tells me to lol

SO on a more important note. i ENTIRELY game dev on my own... welll...i still suck but im getting there!
what iv'e got, is about 4 freinds who are video game addicts and know some pretty damn good ideas for video games... SO when i think ive got somehintg good i go thorw the idea at them, and they reflect on it, or just tell me its Godly.
(besides the fact that one of my best freinds knows C\++\# better then he knows english)

but for you! i'd probably use The Chaos Rift more then i do lol

MadPumpkin wrote:

Kros wrote:Edit: can't spell

Dude get, Mozilla Firefox it has a automatic spell check... i use it... im just a lazy ass(to stuburn to admit i spelled something wrong) and don't change the things even though it tells me to lol

Have it. Doesn't check subject boxes. I misspelled loneliest as lonliest. Fail.

I usually bother people on AIM or IRC or GTalk :p

To make Firefox check textboxes, type about:config into address bar, then go to layout.spellCheckDefault and change the value to 2.

Luckily, I have a few SDL/OpenGL programmer friends IRL I can chat with, even if I'm not working with them. :P

Well I don't know that I have any sage wisdom on code design in particular, just that you will probably rewrite your entire game at least once cumulatively over your development. I'm probably at about two rewrites right now. Be that changing APIs, or dealing with emerging issues or just cleaning up stuff you knew you coded crapily to begin with. Unless you've done a ton of games/general programming before you'll encouter a bunch of stuff you need to redo, don't fight it, don't get depressed/discouraged, it happens.

The most important thing is to get something running that you can interact with. Solo work feeds off progress, you need to be able to see it. I was lucky in that I had both my own motivation and an external due date for the prototype of my current project. About a week in I had the rudimentary game together, its been a couple years since then and my game has pretty much been runable except for a week or two when I converted from OpenGL to Ogre. It will also feed your artist if he/she can see it coming together. Its not going to be full featured and none of the original code may survive to the final build. But the biggest risk to indie/hobby dev is never finishing, its not perf or code design or anything like that.

I'd really like to discuss how we want to break up our game idea from a OOP standpoint

It's nice to have a design document right now because you can scan for what you need.
One method I discovered was list all your objects and actions. Start with nouns, list all nouns in your project, they will be classes.
For example we will use a mario game. So nouns/objects:
Mario, flower power up, 1up, mushroom, star, goomba, block, coin block, bowser, mean fire spitting flowers, etc...

Now to get functions and variables, list the verbs (actions or states of being)
Mario can: die, jump, shoot fire, crouch, be in star mode, swim, say ma ma mia, etc.

and thats one way of breaking down games.

teamtwentythree wrote:Well I don't know that I have any sage wisdom on code design in particular, just that you will probably rewrite your entire game at least once cumulatively over your development. I'm probably at about two rewrites right now. Be that changing APIs, or dealing with emerging issues or just cleaning up stuff you knew you coded crapily to begin with. Unless you've done a ton of games/general programming before you'll encouter a bunch of stuff you need to redo, don't fight it, don't get depressed/discouraged, it happens.

The most important thing is to get something running that you can interact with. Solo work feeds off progress, you need to be able to see it. I was lucky in that I had both my own motivation and an external due date for the prototype of my current project. About a week in I had the rudimentary game together, its been a couple years since then and my game has pretty much been runable except for a week or two when I converted from OpenGL to Ogre. It will also feed your artist if he/she can see it coming together. Its not going to be full featured and none of the original code may survive to the final build. But the biggest risk to indie/hobby dev is never finishing, its not perf or code design or anything like that.

I rewrite my projects all the time, infact I think the average is 3 or 4 times a project....

I know the feeling of being the only coder on my team, but I've been trying to teach him programming. He's slowly picking it up and I know that others would disagree with my teaching style, but I started him off on a simple basic language I created myself, I'm adding it as a library for c++ so that he can do scripting etc. for the project. Maybe if you try to start your friend off with simple tasks in an easier language then slowly build him towards an object oriented language like c++. Just my suggestion.

Don't get the wrong idea, teams suck too.

It's lonelier when you are the only person in an entire team of people who is motivated to work than if you were motivated alone.

GyroVorbis wrote:Don't get the wrong idea, teams suck too.

It's lonelier when you are the only person in an entire team of people who is motivated to work than if you were motivated alone.

Oh, yeah, I know that. I've had that issue a lot in pretty much every project I've ever tried to start with a team.

GyroVorbis wrote:It's lonelier when you are the only person in an entire team of people who is motivated to work than if you were motivated alone.

Or, it sucks when you and the other lead programmer and the designer are super-busy with school, and the newbie coder ("classes scare me" -him) is trying to light a fire under our asses, and taking over the design doc and writing several more for some reason. D: