For all of you out there who are wanting to see more game development articles, I have decided to wait until I have my first prototype of the sample game up and running before I start writing the articles. I think this will be the best thing for all parties involved. That way, I don't have to keep on changing and updating the articles as I refactor my code (it is a work in progress after all). Also, you don't have to wait for me to get my patooty in gear. When you see the articles start coming, they are going to FLOW (at least, a lot more quickly than I could ever hope to write them while writing the game).
So how is the development of the game going? Well, it's going well. I only have a couple more items to knock off the todo list before the core game engine is finished. It is written in such a way, that I should be more than able to use this same engine for any future games (I plan on doing a Roguelike after this game). So, any of you excited about game engine development might be somewhat excited about that.
Last night, I just finished implementing my Console and keyboard handling for the base Application class. Handling of input and rendering is done in the engine using a pseudo-MVC implementation (Model-View-Controller). One thing is for sure, using an MVC approach makes it a lot easier to manage. I can't wait to get to the core implementation of the Tanks game using this approach. It should make the road a lot easier to travel on :).
I tweaked some of my Ruby scripts in my build process. Basically, I now have automatic handling of versioning (including updating of all AssemblyInfo files), automatic generation of Release Notes using special comments directly from my Subversion comment history, and staging of releases (creation of Release Notes, zipping up of binaries and source, and staging to a special location (later to be FTPd)). Overall, I'm quite proud of it and I can't wait to start showing it off. I feel quite pragmatic, that's for sure!
More information to come at a later date. Once the game is in at least prototype phase, I will plan on posting releases so people can download and play the game or just look at the source code. Maybe that way, you all can keep me honest about making progress on the game (in order to make progress on the articles of course).
So, until next time, That's How The Cookie Crumbles!