Hello!
The game programming course has begun, but first:
So, last week we finished the course ‘Spelanalys och speldesign – introduktion, 7,5hp’, which roughly translates to ‘Introduction to game design and game analysis’. I have hardly written anything related to what I’ve learned or done in the course, so I’ll quickly run through it.
As mention in a previous post, I’ve learned about the MDA framework, which is a tool used to analyze games. We did a workshops where we created a game concept under 24 hours, and then we presented it to the class. Another workshop where we made a paper prototype of a existing game. My group made a paper prototype of MariCart.
The last assignment we had for this course was to create a game concept with two keywords that was randomly picked for our group. We as a group wrote and made a concept document, a one page design, a paper prototype and a pitch presentation of our concept, that was handed in or presented to the teacher. I think this project went fairly good, we got good response on our pitch and some of my classmates seemed pretty interested in making a game out of out concept next year.
Individually we wrote a personal rapport on the project, describing the process, the methodology, the purposes, the result, an analysis and a conclusion of the entire project. All of this was turned in last week.
Of course we had to learn about all of these documents and presentations we had to do, and all the stuff they contained, all the other stuff we learned during the course that we used to make the concept as good as good as possible, but I’m not going to go in to more depth in the different lectures we had though, sorry, should have done that weeks ago…
Either way, now I’ve started the course ‘Game programming I – 15 hp’. This first week has not been very educational for me, since I’ve been programing in C++ since 2011. This entire week has been nothing but an introduction week to C and, mainly, C++, which is good for those who haven’t been doing any programming before, but nothing but a refreshing start for my memory, and I’m not talking about my RAM, hah..!
Either way, I’m exuded about this course and it will be fun to learn about real game programming. Though one thing I have learned this week is that the integers can either be signed or unsigned, and short, ‘normal’ or long. Signed allows an int to have negative values, and unsigned does not. Signed is the standard for int’s in C++, so you don’t have to declare if it’s signed, but if you want it to hold only positive numbers, you can declare it as unsigned. If an int is declared as a short, ‘normal’ or long, it basicly tells the PC how big numbers the int can hold and how much RAM the int will take. I didn’t know this befor.
This week I’ve written a program were the user have to guess a random number and the PC, and a program where the PC has to guess a number given by the user, two different guessing games, all very basic exercises.
I am going to post something in this blog every week during this programming course, preferably on Fridays. I’ll be posting updates on what I’ve learned, some screenshots of my code and other related stuff.
My GameDev Blog 