Some "pre-sales" questions...
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@Martin At the moment, she's pretty apathetic about it, but I'm hoping that watching our code come to life as a playable game that is actually fun will get her excited about programming. Plus, I have little kids that I would love to see participate as well.
I've been reading through some of the forums, and everyone seems super nice and helpful. That is very important when learning a new dev process! Cheers!
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@plarpco said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:
@pianofire Thanks! I was thinking more of "pair programming" where we work together to develop sitting on the couch together.
This is exactly what I do with my son.
We have the Switch hooked up to our fifty inch television, and hand the USB keyboard back and forth. For a "mouse", we keep our Pro Controller sitting between us, so we can reach the left analog stick, which scrolls the code up and down.
F5 on the keyboard toggles the running of the program. There's a thread somewhere on the forum with a full list of keyboard shortcuts.
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@Spacemario Thanks! Glad that setup is working. I'll give it a try. Purchasing tonight!
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@plarpco Glad I was able to help!
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@plarpco said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:
Purchasing tonight!
Thank you for your support. I hope you have a great time and we get to see some cool creations :)
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@plarpco said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:
@Spacemario Thanks! Glad that setup is working. I'll give it a try. Purchasing tonight!
Be aware this is ultra addictive and it will absorb your time like no other Switch software. (I've already got 315hrs on it. it's just soooooooo much fun)
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@SteveZX81 HI Steve! Thanks for the warning! I've seen your posts a lot of the forums here -- I'm glad to see you asking all the right questions, and getting answers and support from everyone. I think I have a few of your posts bookmarked already. Cheers!
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@plarpco One thing which really helped me out when I started was going through the tutorials one-by-one, and manually typing the code for at least parts of them, until I really understood the concepts.
Once you get to the actual "game" tutorials though, you might want to consider leaping right into the docs for the map editor and do things that way, versus the "hard way" of manually looping to draw tiles, and calculating your own collision detection (which is what the "game" tutorials have you do).
I'm of mixed opinions how valuable that exercise is, I waffle on it-- at least examine the code both ways, and make up your mind where you invest your time.
Anyway, just figured I'd throw this out there as a possible good way to get started.
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@Spacemario Thanks! I've been going through the tutorials and getting code to run. So far so good! I haven't hit the game tutorials yet, that will happen tonight (hopefully).
Without knowing much about game programming, I figured that a Dr. Mario type game would work like:
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Draw some background, or border around the playing field. I don't know if this would be sprites, or a map, or shapes. Anything else it could be?
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Have sprites for all of the pieces (pills), and have sprites for all of the "viruses".
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Write code to place the initial set of viruses based on some rules.
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Write code to generate random pieces
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Handle piece movement, including player movement (rotation, side-to-side, dropping, etc.) and falling pieces.
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Write code to handle end game.
Once I perfect the base game, I was hoping to add cool features. One thing I really want is some metrics after a game. What was the players virus count over time, virus clearing rate, biggest combo, etc. I figured I would almost need to store a history of every piece played, every virus cleared, etc. Is that something Fuze will be able to tolerate? Storing a huge history table, and then crunching some numbers?
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@plarpco It sounds like you have a really good handle on this already-- those are more or less exactly the steps I would follow!
For the background, I'd just draw one or more stylish backgrounds in the image editor, and use the "load image" function to display them; may as well not over-complicate things on that front!
The metrics idea sounds really cool! Having played some Dr. Mario in the past myself, each individual match isn't really that long-- I don't see why you couldn't just store the move data into an array of structs.
Then if you wanted lifetime metrics for a given player, you could write the structs to a file, and re-load it when the player visits your "stats" screen.
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@Spacemario Epic. Thanks for the tips! Is reading and writing to a file pretty much the only "save data" functionality? I'm assuming there isn't the ability to parse json or xml, so the only option is delimited files?
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@plarpco Yes at the moment this is the case. I am sure that will be expanded in the future. I did an example of how to write and read variable length data here: https://fuzearena.com/forum/topic/70/hints-and-tips/10
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@plarpco I also wrote a program which reads and writes save data! It's shared as "Naughty or Nice" (a little calendar-based behavioral tracker my son and I wrote to track his "strikes" :D ):
SW-1537-8645-5886
No way to parse JSON or XML at the moment unfortunately. But it's not too bad with plain text files-- I made my records delimited by length, since that was fixed. Then I just loop and substring (via "slicing", like in Python) to load the results back from the file.
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@pianofire thanks! I'll take a look. I've got so many ideas! Just have to start writing code. Thanks for all the support!
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@Spacemario Cool! I'll check it out. Thanks for all the help. This weekend should be me putting fingers to keyboard to get proof of concepts going!
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At some point I'll have to create a WIP thread, but I didn't make enough progress this weekend to warrant it. My assumptions in my above post about how to do this were completely wrong, but I'm looking at MikeDX's Fuzetris99, and a post over at GameDev.net to get me back on track.
Edit: BTW did MikeDX post his Fuzetris99 code anywhere? I'm thinking I'll need to watch all 4 hours of the livestream and take notes. Halp!
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I can share the code but it's worth waiting for the next patch for reasons I can't reveal yet
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@MikeDX Thank you. I can wait!
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Quick update on my journey! So far so good. I've stopped and re-started 4 times. I finally finished the game tutorials which helped a lot. I think I have a good path, and my code is more organized and thought-out. My guess is I'll be on version 10 before it's fully playable.
I'm realizing now that my knowledge of game programming is lacking. Give me a business problem and a database, and I can put something together in my sleep, but this is all very different (and exciting).
Does anyone have any recommendations for books that might help with some of the general concepts of game programming? I know it can be very language specific, but I'm wondering if there are any resources that will just get me thinking about these problems in a different way. Maybe I'm looking for a silver bullet that doesn't exist. I'm willing to just grind it out (the journey is most of the fun), but I can only work on this at night (from 10pm - 12 am yawn) and a couple of hours on the weekend, and I'm getting tired of just hitting F5 here to see new posts trying to get my FUZE fix.
What I need is a windows version of FUZE so I can be coding during the day on the company dime. shhhh don't tell my boss
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@plarpco said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:
Does anyone have any recommendations for books that might help with some of the general concepts of game programming? I know it can be very language specific, but I'm wondering if there are any resources that will just get me thinking about these problems in a different way. Maybe I'm looking for a silver bullet that doesn't exist.
You could take a look at Humble Bundle from time to time. Humble Bundle offers great bundles with games, software and books with changing themes. You can pay what you want but there are different tiers within every bundle. For example "Pay at least 1$ to get this, pay 10$ and you'll get that stuff as well" and so on and so forth. And you can decide where your money goes. You can give money to the creators of the content, you can leave humble bundle a tip and most important: you can support different charity organisations. It doesn't matter who gets your choosen amount. You could even give 100% to charity.
They had great bundles in the past regarding game developing, ranging from game making software (for example Clickteam Fusion and GameMaker) to complete IDE stuff (Unity and Unreal Engine).
Currently there is an Unreal Engine Game Development bundle and a Learn and play VR-AR Game Dev bundle available.
While the VR-AR bundle doesn't seem to be helpful, the Unreal Engine bundle contains a "Math For Games Training Course". Don't know if it's worth 18.21$ (currently, price keeps increasing because it's "pay more than the average") but that could be a start. Maybe I'll get the VR-AR bundle anyways as developing a Smartphone AR-App/Game looks like much fun to me.
Another possibility could be Udemy. There you'll find different online courses for almost anything you can imagine. There's currently a flash sale where you'll pay only 12€ per course (at least this sale is available in germany, don't know where you are from).
@plarpco said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:
What I need is a windows version of FUZE so I can be coding during the day on the company dime. shhhh don't tell my boss
IIRC someone from the FUZE Team said that they're working on a FUZE4 Windows version. FUZE BASIC already exists but it represents an old version with less functionality as far as I remember.
Hope this was helpful!
