Sharp Coding

I was excited by the prospect of XNA and what it could do.  Especially with a background spanning several years of programming, including the wonderful AMOS.  More recently I’ve been a VB convert and especially liked mucking about with VB.NET in Visual Studio when creating ASP.NET sites.

So, it was something of a culture shock when I tried C# for the first time.  I was all Dim MyString As String, when I needed to be String myString;.  Still, it’s only words and it’s not like they ever got anyone in trouble, right?

I haven’t written game code for a few years and I’m enjoying the mental challenge that the switch entails.  There’s game state management to consider, and it’s all OOP based, and 60fps at 720p and goodness knows what else.

But mostly there’s nothing that gets my creative juices going like trying to make code work.  I’m abuzz now we’ve settled on the mechanic and I can start to code it.  We haven’t settled on a structured methodology for development, but here’s a few of my favourites we could try:

RAD: Really Arsey Development.  You know the sort, when a co-developer refuses to help debug your code because you’ve indented to 3 characters and not 4.

AGILE: All Great Ideas Leave Eventually.  Like scope-creep in reverse, where all your hard work and creativity is sacrificed to ship a generically bland shooter instead.

SCRUM: Scope Creep Rampant Under Management.  This is like AGILE, but it’s where incompetent managers try to cram irrelevant features into a perfectly working product and it’s 2 weeks until shipping time.

DSDM: Don’t Save, Don’t Matter.  Spend 8 hours working on a piece of code and deliberately don’t save it because you know you’ll be redundant tomorrow when the publisher pulls the plug on an eminently sellable masterpiece.

I’ll let you know when we decide.