Kickstarter

Apologies for the long, silent hiatus! Life, work, and burnout interceded. I'm clearly not going to make the original February completion deadline, but rest assured, I remain committed to making good on the project. 

You'll find links to the new video on your backer page at codeschool.org.

In the next few weeks, we'll cover some groundwork for 3D rendering, write an Asteroids clone, and perhaps look at some broad object-oriented design principles that concern game code. 

In the downtime, I've been reconsidering the later material. We may end up skipping 'old-style' OpenGL for modern OpenGL, and Pyglet has become increasingly frustrating to work with (among other things, updated AMD drivers seem to have broken Pyglet on my Windows install). So after the next few updates, there may be another (shorter) hiatus while I do some investigating.

The Holidays disrupted me more than I anticipated, and I've had some computer trouble, but I should get back on a weekly schedule here out.

I'll have the next video and code up tomorrow for our Asteroids clone. I was concerned that not many people have yet watched the later videos. Perhaps people are just waiting, but if this is because the material has been difficult to follow, please let me know. I'm taking a bit different approach with the code examples now, presenting the code in stages of development rather than as a complete program from the outset. Hopefully, this will be easier to follow.

A few people have reported an error when running code examples. This seems to be a Pyglet bug that occurs on some systems but not others. I can't reproduced the bug myself, so I can't really address it. There's a workaround, though, using Sprites instead of Image.blit().

For the $25 backers, I'll send out email for voting on name selections this week.

Thanks, everyone, for your patience.

Sorry for the delay! It turns out these videos with lots of code examples are even more time consuming to make than usual, and algorithms are always tricky to cover. I ended up splitting the topic into two parts, the second of which will come this next week. The week after will be our Pacman clone.

This one's pretty tough, so I probably won't have it till mid week. In the meantime, the Cloning Tetris video is now available to $5 backers (check your codeschool.org link). Installment 6 will be our Pacman clone, which will demonstrate a few more concepts, such as simple use of sounds, animations, and AI.

Sorry for the lateness, but this took longer than expected. This week, a complete Tetris clone in 400 SLOC (significant lines of code). To see the video, you can check the game programming page on codeschool (the private links which backers were sent last week). The code itself is found at: https://bitbucket.org/brianwill/game-programming

The next installment may get pushed back to early/mid next week. It will cover 2D graphics algorithms, which lay the foundation for 3D graphics.