DS Coding Progress

Can you guess what it is yet?

Can you guess what it is yet?

After spending a few hours tonight sorting out the multitude of notes and scribbles I have, my little DS project has something to show off.

Right now the bats don’t move, and neither does the ball. However the hooks are there for me to make that happen, in a planned and non hacked way.

The nature of the DS’s screens are still totally baffling. How do I know which screen mode is the best to use? On the GBA it was simple, they all had different but obvious functions. On the DS it seems you can use any, and all that changes is the amount of video ram and where in memory things go.

The learning curve for this seems to be vertical at the moment, so I’m keeping notes to avoid the nasty trap of doing something once, and then never being able to repeat it.

Oh, to prevent insanity I am using a TiddlyWiki to store all my notes in. I was going to get a proper outlining app, but I don’t want one that ties me to Windows or my Mac. It’s no good if all my designs are on my Mac, but I’m working on my PC.

Oh yeah, this project is called Po_ng and is quite obviously a total ripoff of Pong. I’ll be adding some extra “game modes” to it and maybe some colour. The point of this game is not to produce yet another Pong ripoff, but to make sure I can get a basic game working. I have a list of classic games I want to remake, each one slightly more technically advanced than the last.

About James

I'm just a person who likes writing software in their spare time. I'm not an "indie games developer" and am not trying to escape my day job and live in the happy world of games dev. I'm more like one of those people that used to write games in their spare time in the 80s. My stuff would be PD or Shareware if this were the 80s or 90s. It's good to comment on the posts in here :)