So, I decided to start simple and make a game I know I could finish but would allow me to focus on process to help me produce my future projects. So I decided on a pong clone. The difference is I wanted to all elements that I think would make it fun(ner).
My development techniques are all agile based (SCRUM). I am targeting two week iterations to produce valueable functionality. My plan is to produce working demos that demonstrate the current state of the game as it is in development.
With that out, my first iteration is complete. It started on 4/11 and was scheduled to end 4/25. Fortunately, I am a day ahead of schedule which is good and bad. Good because I accomplished the items I committed to. Bad because my estimates were off, but will provide nice feedback for upcoming iterations.
At the end of each iteration I will provide links to that iteration's deliverables to give you all a chance to see the progress. I encourage everyone to provide all feedback. Any feedback is beneficial to help me make the best product I can make.
I also would like to touch on some of the things I thought went well and think that will need to be improved on. This will give me a chance to review what happened during the last iteration and also get insight from you guys on things that have happened in your projects.
Things that went well
Selected strong indie tools
- Torque Game Builder: a fully featured 2D game engine that makes rapid development of games easy and fun. You can purchase an indie license for $100. Best price on the market for the power and efficiency you get.
- Torsion: a Torquescript editor with a nice arsenal of debugging tools. It is a must for any type of Torque Game Engine develoment. It goes for $39.95.
- RallyDev: an online agile project management application. It tracks product backlogs, iteration status, and provide agile metrics to know how far along you are in your project. Best of all there is a free version.
Created a testing process
I came up with a way to test new functionality and organize it in a way that would clutter or interfere with the application. This helped verify new functionality didn't break existing functionality. Taking the time to do that helped speed up my development time.
Things that didn't go so well
Stories too detailed: Initially I created stories that were too detailed. This pigeon-holed me into thinking of only one way to approach a requirement. This present an opportunity for me to refactor my existing stories in the product backlog.
Didn't setup source control: I should be slapped for this. I started the project without having any source control. There was a point where I felt the brunt of this when I performed a large refactoring that I almost had to roll back. Luckily I found my flaw and was able to proceed with the refactoring. Otherwise I would have been is a really bad situation.
Opportunities for the next iteration
- Setup Source Control
- Refactor User Stories so they are not implementation specific
Iteration Deliverables
Inside the PowerPong root directory are too important files at this point: readMe.txt and console.log.
readMe.txt - Describes the controls because the in game input text was left generic because controls will be customizeable.
console.log - Log of what is happening in the game. Send this along with any defects to me at charles_gibson_jr@hotmail.com
UPDATE: The issues regarding the Mac distribution has been identified. In the process of updating and redistributing a Mac version. Thanks for your patience.
- PowerPong - Win32
- PowerPong - Mac
OOH OOH EEH EEH
No comments:
Post a Comment