Pirates Jewels II - 3 Game Modes now complete

WHEW!   Man what a lot of work!

As you may remember I underwent the task of teaching myself Java very seriously this year and had to set aside my game development for a significant time but that focus resulted in a very nice promotion in my day job so I am now a full time software engineer ! (yay!)

But now that I am doing that all day long and things are getting a little bit grounded I have been getting back on track with my current game development project.

I do have to say my next project is very likely to NOT be in C++ / AGK  .. but we'll get in to that more later.

For now let me share an 'in progress' screenshot from the current build of Pirates Jewels II!

If you recall the last time I was able to share a screenshot was in April of this year ( see here ) where things looked a lot rougher!

But now me'hearties! Now she's looking grand indeed!

I would like to say the graphics are definitely not final; but they've improved so much its a very nice feeling to watch the game at this point and I excited to continue polishing and refine it further!

Three more game modes to go !  Wish me luck!

- punchy out

Learning Curve : Finding out you wrote bad code; way after the fact

So I have not been blogging a lot lately, and I have a lot I want to write about but I'm also very busy.

I have been settling in (a little bit) to my new job as a software engineer but there is so much to learn ; a lot of my 'free time' (aka blog time included in that) goes towards making sure I'm learning all the new technologies that the product I'm working on in my day job uses.

In my night-job - the indie game designer I spend time trying to write the next incarnation of Pirates Jewels.

I first wrote this product as Pirates Treasure in DarkBasicPro.  It worked but being a BASIC variant it was slow and had a couple of bugs I was convinced that were as a result of the DBPro platform.

So I upgraded to the AppGameKit using C++ ; well really C because I did not know C++ .. well I didn't know C either honestly.

I taught myself C and AppGameKit while I did the Pirates Treasure rewrite.  I ended up re-naming it to Pirates Jewels due to a naming conflict on the App Store but once it was done the bugs were gone and the game was much faster.

So then I started learning C++ ; but soon swapped to Java because my work uses Java and I wanted to possibly get a promotion to a developer.

Here we are a few months later and I got that promotion and now I'm re-writing Pirates Jewels in Object Oriented Code.

And today I found some code that as I read it I said to myself "That doesn't do anything?"

Sure enough I commented the code out and it did nothing?

So that's my quick learning curve article for today; I ended up laughing about it. I'm sure there are a few other lines of code that I was trying something out and I ended up going a different direction and then didn't remove everything.

But the point of this one is its nice to have learned enough that I am more readily able to read a bit of code and 'know' what its doing ; or in this case not doing.