Busy doing other things today so, rather than attempting to write code in a short amount of time, I went through what I actually had to comment it all up so it’s readable by Aaron as well as myself. I have to remember sometimes that I’m working collaboratively now and this stuff has to be done for both our sanity’s. Hmmm, is sanity’s actually an allowed expression? Never mind.

In all seriousness, we’re both new to GMS. We’re approaching using the new system where anything we write could potentially be re-used at some point, just like most programmers. So, as well as writing routines with the mind-set that it could be taken out and reworked for another game, we have to make sure the bloody thing is going to be understandable by either one of us. Because I’ve done this scrolling system with surfaces to use here, Aaron hasn’t wasted his time going off and looking into how to do it as well, or what would be the point of both of us working on the game.

So, months down the line if he needs to do something similar, he shouldn’t have to waste time trying to do it all himself when we already have code to do it. He should now, in theory, be able to lift out this code from our project, and just refactor it quickly, based on the comments I’ve left in there for that exact reason.

Learning a new coding language is hard enough and I’ve deliberately not really looked hard at anything not directly related to what I need to do at that time just so I can remain focused. Hence Paradroid has a brilliant tilemap system coded into the game by Aaron, and I’ve no idea how he’s done it. But, if I look at his code, it should all make sense, once I actually need to do it.

I also started looking for a replacement spreadsheet template to modify for us to keep our development tasks in order. The one we’ve been attempting to use is frankly terrible. Hopefully I can finish modifying this basic one I’ve found and switch over to that before too long. Working as a team means you have to be organised about what needs to be done, and when. This will be our way of doing it.

Next up for me is to fix the inevitable bug I spotted which explains why my surfaces text have not been changing colour. I spotted it while commenting the code but it’s a bit more than just a quick line change so i’ve just made a note to fix it next edit for now. After this it’s going to be loading in the actual text that Andy himself used in Paradroid on the C64 and put that into the game to get the formatting right. I’ve done some editing but left the flavour as true to the original as possible, based on what else it’s going to need to show for our version of the game.

Argued again with Aaron about giving me my big robot. One of these days he’ll get it 🙂

Finally got an email from Yoyo games about the Mac beta of the editor. Beta testing starts 22nd March and I hope I get in at that time. I can hopefully ditch parallels completely then and be able to work much, much quicker.

Categorised as: Development | Game Studio 2 | Paradroid