Snake Feedback
4 mins
The first portfolio game, “Snake” has now been completed. I am quite happy with the end result of this project, although it didn’t go as well as I had expected. The main problems experienced with this came from the fact that it was a new framework that I hadn’t used before. Planning out the project was going quite well, and I didn’t receive too many problems until later on into development, after I’d already set up most of the structure of how the code was going to work. However, after I’d implemented the code for creating the board and some other bits of setup, I wanted to try get something displaying before I moved onto the gameplay aspects of the snake moving. This is where I fell behind with the project. I wanted to try and have the rendering working in the individual classes of code, to make it more object oriented. But it took a long time to discover how to access the renderer in files that weren’t the core source file. By the time I managed to find how to do it, through looking at the other project “DungeonDeath”, I didn’t have much time left to finish the game. This meant that in the end I didn’t manage to fully implement everything I wanted to. I had the game running and working before I tried to implement a menu system that would allow the player to change settings, have a game over screen etc. This was going to use different game states that would set up the scenes based on what state you were in. I added in all of the code for this, but it didn’t seem to be displaying anything and just didn’t work. I eventually took it out and added some final changes to the main gameplay before trying to re-implement the menu near to the end of the project. This was unsuccessful and ended causing runtime errors everytime I tried. This was dissapointing because as far as I could see, the system should have been working. I put in debug messages in places to make sure it was running through the menu, and it was getting into the main menu scene, but just wasn’t displaying.
If I had more time, there are a few things that I would add to the game. The main one being a menu system that would allow the player to replay the game and have an end-game screen with their score displayed. I would also like to look into using sound with the ASGE in order to make the game more interesting. Perhaps with some backing track and noises when you pick up the food. One of the plans I had from the start which I never ended up implementing was an animation state so that when you eat a piece of food, the snake would open it’s mouth with some sort of eating animation. Overall I didn’t manage to get as much done for this game as I had hoped, but I still have a full functioning core game that displays the score for a player. At least for the second project, I will now be better prepared for getting it setup as I now know how to properly access things like the renderer in different classes.
Post Feedback
After the feedback 1-1 I now know what I need to improve on for the next game. My main points to improve on are: Meeting the full deliverables (creating a menu), Dynamic memory management, and making use of delta time instead of sleeping threads. The first point is something I have already mentioned and to improve on that, with the next game I am going to try get the basic parts of a menu system implemented at the beginning, before making the game. Memory management was another thing I struggled with in Snake because I didn’t make good use of deallocating the memory I had used in loops. This is something I will look more carefully at for the endless runner. The best way to do this is to have deallocation of memory put in everytime I use some new memory. The final point was about the fact that I used the (sleepfor) command for slowing down the game rather than the proper way of doing it, which is built into the framework through the use of delta time.
Snake Gameplay:
Subscribe
Subscribe to this blog via RSS.
Categories
Blog 4
Recent Posts
-
Posted on 22 Apr 2018
-
Posted on 26 Feb 2018
-
Posted on 01 Dec 2017
-
Posted on 19 Nov 2017
Popular Tags
Blog (4) Networking (1) Development (3) Code-snippets (1) Low-level programming (10) Nothing interesting (1) Snake game (5) Board games (3) Game adaptions (1) Play & games (2) Assignments (1) Level design (1) Endless runner (1) Birdman game (1) Group work (2) Networking game (1)