Managed World

Although I didn't give an update yesterday, I did get some work done. Even though I've had the last several days off of work, I'm sure Chris would feel more comfortable knowing that I haven't been spending my entire days working on Spaceballs (I have a feeling that Chris would only feel truly comfortable if I dropped out of the competition since he knows he's fighting a losing battle).

My spaceship is all hooked up and working. It drives off the mouse and can rotate both directions just fine. I just finished hooking up the bullets. Now you can hit the spacebar to fire and the bullet will fly in whatever direction the ship is/was facing.

To limit the sheer number of bullets (and to add another game mechanic), I went ahead and added a firing rate to the ship (or, more specifically, the weapon). If I have the time to implement three different ships like I want to, each one will have a different firing rate to differentiate the behavior and strategies for each different ship type.

Before I move on to hooking up an enemy and getting collision detection working, I need to do some cleanup refactoring. I also need to do some "bulking up" of my infrastructure to make sure that the game continues to be easy to develop.

After I had removed it earlier, I'm thinking of re-introducing the messaging system since I don't like how coupled my various classes are getting. I'm holding off on that now though as I really don't want to push it too far if it isn't necessary. I figure that I'll actually just continue to push forward and if my coupling becomes worse, then I will revisit the topic. There might be other ways though that I can manage the dependencies and coupling without introducing an entire message system. I'll have to do some more thinking on that.

Well, I'm back off to coding. I'll try to get in another update before I go to bed tonight (hence the "Part 1" in the title :)). I'll feel a lot better about the progress in the game once I get an enemy and collision detection hooked up. I know it's only Day 6, but once an enemy and collision detection is hooked up, I'll be a heck of a lot closer to having an entire tracer bullet hooked up.