The calm before the storm

This may be an odd and somewhat controversial statement, but I am mostly convinced I am actually a masochist. Now, before you all label me as some sick, twisted pervert and lock me up, allow me to explain.

Being a programmer, my days are mostly spent in an endless cycle of frustration and joy; spend 8 hours trying to fix a bug, banging my head against the wall, followed by 5 mins of yelling out in praise of whatever Gods saw fit to show me mercy. As you can see, this endless cycle has a ratio of about 80 pain, 20 pleasure. It's not something a normal person would choose to do as work, much less willingly in their own free time.

Yet here I am, plodding away for hours on end. Even now, as I write this mess of words resembling a blog post, my mind is planning a complete system overhaul and major redesign of a game I had previously developed. Titled 'Haunted Within', the project was forced reach code lock and release prematurely. This meant a lot of rushed code, hacky workarounds for issues, and overall poor standards that I would not normally tolerate. I've regretted a lot of what I did, and now that I have some free time on my hands I figured I can revisit it.

Exhibit A: a work in progress

My plan to 'fix' the game is fairly straight forward; since most of my desired features are already in I simply need to remove all the hacked-together bits, correct the underlying problem at its source, and overall polish the fundamentals of what already exists. In the cases where I do need to change major aspects, I'll simply scrap what I have and rework the system from the ground up. Obviously this will take a lot of work and time, so I'll try to avoid doing whole changes if I can. But I know for a fact that some systems really need the overhaul.

System A: Graphics

This one I don't think needs too much fiddling. I do want to touch up on the draw order; currently the objects are being drawn in order of  most recently to least recently spawned. By introducing a z-buffer, I will be able to rearrange the draw order so that objects closer to the foreground are drawn before others.

System B: Game Logic

This system is where things get messy. When I say game logic, it refers to things such as object spawning, collision handling, object logic, etc. Overall, this system tries to handle far too much on its own and does so in a really disorganised way. I plan to split the game logic into 2 separate systems, one for object spawning / logic, and one for object interactions.

System C: UI

Ah the UI system. The trouble with UI in this project is that it uses a third-party system, named CGUI. Normally third-party systems aren't a bad thing and can significantly make things easier, but CGUI is... well, it's not exactly pretty. It seems to be designed using c# syntax and this makes it rather tricky to integrate into my own code. To be honest I'm not sure what I can do here... I guess I can try to keep it as clean and organised as possible. Pretty much all I can do, really.

I'm going to be working my way through these systems and more (a LOT more) through the coming weeks, whenever I have time away from my other duties. My long-term goal is to have the game polished enough for sale via Steam Greenlight, so if I want to get there I need to get working.