Currently I’m going right back to basics with my Nintendo DS coding. I’ve made a list of ‘classic’ games I want to copy, choosing ones that get progressively more complex. The idea being I have lots of short, relatively simple projects to do rather than spending the next six months trying to make some random game I’ve invented.
I need focus you see, or I just waste my time reading Wikipedia and thinking about game design, rather than actually doing the hard work. Hard work doesn’t have to mean bashing out lines of code, making a good design or learning something useful is also part of the game.
My list of games to write begin with good old Pong, and progress up through Space Invaders, Galaxians, Tetris, Original Mario Brothers and finally Super Mario. Short detours will be taken along the way since I quite like Qix, Voidrunner and Robotron too.
I’m not trying to clone these games, I’m more using them as a definite “thing” to create. The games themselves are not important, the process of making them is what I want to learn. Right now I can knock up a database-enabled Windows application very quickly with little hard thinking required. I have a workflow I can follow, and all my tools are in the right places to be efficiently used.
With my DS coding I’m starting from scratch and before writing something cool, need to first learn not just how to write DS stuff, but how to even do that effectively. To me the best way to do this would be to make lots of short, simple things, repeatedly throwing away and re-writing pieces of code.
I’ll document my progress here, but I’m really trying hard to avoid lots of posts saying “I’m going to do the sprite bit next” “after this part I’ll be doing the input handling”. I’d rather have posts with “So far I have the sprites working, download a test here” since the Internet is too full of people saying what they will be doing, rather than saying what they have done.
It’s called “software engineering”, but it’s more like a mad scientist inventing highly unstable and possibly lethal inventions in his lab.
