Believe it or not, I wasn't finished in my previous entry :-p. I had to go to school [sad]. This entry will be sort of a chronicling of what i've done to get to the point I am in making my Reversi clone.

I am using SDL for graphics, FMOD for sound, and, sadly, myself for game art, may God have mercy on the unlucky souls that ever play my game.

My development started on the eleventh of the month, as I dutifully commented into my code. I was originally planning on submitting the game to TANSTAAFL for his coding test but I PM'ed him and he's no longer pursuing his IsoHex company idea. Still, it should be a good exercise as I have done very little to no actual 'game' coding in over a year, and that didn't come out so well.

My first task, in my mind at least, was to get something on the screen. If you have something to look at, at least it's more interesting than a black window. I cranked up paint and went to work making a background board. I'm retarded when it comes to art, so i'm sure I did the least efficient way possible. I got the basics down though, green with 64 squares, even I can't mess that up [lol].

Initialization goes well, starts up, loads graphics to surfaces, and the Board constructor puts pieces in the 4 center squares.

Next, I decide that I want to have user input. What kind of game would it be if it didn't? So, off I went to learn about the SDL mouse. As a note, if anything is prefaced with SDL, be sure to know that whatever it is can't be difficult. For those who have never used SDL, check it out, you may be pleasantly surprised. I certainly recommend TANSTAAFL's book, Focus on SDL, and no, he didn't bribe me to say that. It's a good book to introduce yourself to SDL and get you up and running.

Next I hit the first snag in the development. Converting mouse coordinates to array locations. So, I wrote a simple, yet hacked together, function to take in an int and return a value to be used to place a chip in the correct location on the board. I know, hacking functions together is bad, but I have the mindset of "make it work". It'll probably come back to bite me one day and i'll learn a great lesson, but until then i'll stick with what I have.

Next problem came around more quickly than the first. I tried implementing turns based on a boolean variable, but apparently hadn't placed it in the correct place (presumably making the condition always true and getting itself stuck in an infinite loop.) After moving the function around, I got it working correctly and all was good.

Yesterday I had a flash of inspiration to implement a save/load feature. This simply takes the board array and writes it to a file. Certainly nothing to prevent people from cheating, but I think it's a good feature to have. If you're playing at work against the computer or something, hit a button to save and come back to it later when the boss is gone. That's my philosophy anyway. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think this will make it into any offices, just thinking for any future games [wink]. Something is buggy with loading a saved game though. An extra piece shows up. I'm unsure yet if this is an actual loading bug or a bug in how I create the board in the game, i'm betting on the former.

If you're still reading up to here, i'm surprised [lol]. Today I haven't done any code, posted, went to work for about 3 hours, then school, and here I am. Ah yes, work. For those of you who may not remember what I do right now (probably everyone reading) I design tombstones. With my previous comment about being retarded at art, this may seem contradictory, but the program I use (Gerber Omega) does wonders even for me, the non-artist. You stop thinking about the pieces of paper in front of you as representing dead people after about the first week [lol].

I think today I will see if I can track down the loading bug and MAYBE start working on the rules of the game. I'm not particularly looking forward to that part [sad].

Edit: Almost forgot, a screenshot [lol]. It's not much, but it IS my first real opportunity to post one.