Technical Discussion March 10 2008

Topic 1: Post Competition Discussion

General remarks

• The competition was very fun
• Code quality decreases with time.
• There was a lack of content generated for the competition.

Ideas for next time

• longer duration which allows for sleep
• allow previously written code
• bigger teams

Ryan and Ted - Juxta Records

• started small and went from there
• 75% of features needed for the design were coded
• tile based gameplay
• sprite engine including animation
• the engine is flexible
• ran into a circular dependency problem
• the game has many features but no content

Eric and Colin - House

• Used SDL which both of us were unfamiliar with
• Spent a long time on design which lead to a great design.
• In hindsight, we should of started with a simple design instead.
• The idea was based on a doll house where the player is trapped and must get out. Each room has unique puzzles that don't make a lot of sense. e.g. hitting a Mario themed block and dying.
• Animation system was merged in late which resulted in about an hour of merging to make it work.

Topic 2: Test driven approach to writing functions

In this approach the function is treated as a black box before written. The programmer plans test cases that would represent appropriate test cases for the function. Then the programmer implements the function. The function is tested through a test suite automatically and if it passes all the test it is assumed to be good enough to work.

If a programmer modifies the function, they run the test cases again.

Members Present

• Colin Hume
• Dave Bregman
• Eric Raue
• Ryan Bujnowicz
• Ted Tate