Tuesday 9 October 2007

One step closer to release

Another couple of items have been ticked off before the release. I've embedded the graphics and sound into the executable, so it should be a single 1.3 meg file which can be placed anywhere on your system regardless of whether you're using Windows or Linux.

I may be able to reduce the size of the executable a bit by ditching some of the none-required code modules, but I'll worry about that at the end.

I've changed the program to running in "strict" mode (something I should have done from the start). This is the same sort of idea as "option explicit" on QBasic / Visual Basic style programming languages in that all variables must be declared before use, and the variable types cannot change without being re-declared. This is handy for catching typos in variable or object names.

I've change the front screen to make it a bit nicer and added a basic high score feature to the game.

There are only a couple of small things that need to be done now which I should get done tomorrow. It's looking like I'll be releasing the game this weekend providing no show stopping bugs show up when I start testing the game on Windows.

Just for reference (and because I can't remember if I've mentioned this before or not), this is being coded in BlitzMax. This is down to it being relatively easy to use and cross-platform (you buy it once and can download and use it on all available operating systems).

4 comments:

The Sports Satirist said...

How long did it take you to do all that?

DanO said...

Lol!

For the entire game? About a week. For that little bit - an hour or two (I'm not in any rush ;-)).

It took that long because of the menu screen. It took a couple of attempts before I settled on a look that I was happy with.

The Sports Satirist said...

Even if it was a week, that is a short amount of time.

DanO said...

In fairness, with it being a game remake of an old (and of a very well known) game there isn't a lot of coding to do - it's more trying to get the feel of it right.

Also BlitzMax is a very good language for the rapid development of 2D games. You can knock a basic game framework together in a couple of hours as Blitz has built-in functions for sprite handling and animation, collision detection and so on.