Week 1: Setting up and Installeering

This week was not the most exciting in terms of this project, but necessary nonetheless.  It was all about setting up my development environment and a bit of troubleshooting to get things working.

First of all, I grabbed a copy of Windows 7 professional and installed that into a Bootcamp partition on my iMac.  This didn't exactly go without a hitch, Windows 7 doesn't seem to include the right ATI driver for the graphics card in the late 2009 iMacs. So when you get to the third stage of the installation, the screen goes blank... not very helpful.  Thankfully there is a pretty simple work around that involves booting up in repair mode and deleting the ATI driver. This forces Windows to use a generic driver, but one that actually works.  So with that done I could complete the installation and then install the boot camp drivers to get a proper ATI driver for the graphics card.

From there it was a matter of installing some development tools.  I got Visual Studio Express Edition with Windows Phone Developer Tools, which in fact contains XNA Game Studio, not that you would know by the product name.  The install for this went without a hitch.  I also installed Git Extensions, however for some reason the Visual Studio plugin didn't work, I'm not too fussed about that though since I'll probably use the command line most of the time.

With all that setup, I fired up Visual Studio and created a new Windows game project, called Breakout, that I'll use for building my first game. This was simple enough but there was one hitch, I wasn't able to run the game within Parallels, I got an error saying there was no suitable device support HiDef.  Fortunately the Internet came to the rescue again.  Apparently this is caused by Parallels only supporting DirectX 9. The fix is pretty simple, you just need to right click on the Game project, select Properties, then change the Game Profile to "Use Reach ...", the game should now run and display a beautiful cornflower blue screen.


I also tried out VMWare Fusion as an alternative to Parallels, it also suffered from the same HiDef support problem, so there wasn't really any reason to switch.  I'll see how it goes with Parallels for while, I do get the sense that I'm eventually either going to need more RAM, or I'm going to have to reboot into Windows more often, but I'll see how it goes.


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In order to get up to speed with C# I read through Intro to C# from Objective-C and Java. I've gotta say, it's not the best document.  I realise it is only 24 pages, but it seems to really skim over important language features at the expensive of talking about the CLR platform.  For example, it has a list of about 15 items that Java has but are different in C# or that C# has but Java doesn't, like indexers, different inheritance syntax, access restrictions on overriden members, clashing interface inheritance but it doesn't actually discuss how C# does it.  And yet there is a page and half on garbage collection, which is essentially the same between the two platforms.  Oh well, I'm sure I cope.


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I've also setup a Github project at http://github.com/seangeo/breakout. It's a public project so anyone can grab the code, although at this stage there isn't much to see, hopefully it will get more interesting.


Next week I'm going to start getting familiar with the XNA API and draw some sprites.  If I get time I might make them move across the screen!

Refurbished and Repurposed

I've decided to repurpose this blog as a journal for my foray into game programming.

I've always loved video games and they have always been a big part of my life.  When I decided to to return to university after a brief stint as a sound engineer, my main motivation for doing computer science was to end up as a game programmer. I even dabbled in building a MMORPG in my second and third years.  However, at some point I took a different direction.  I don't really know why, probably a combination of factors: a lack of local jobs and not wanting to move state again, the idea of another industry being the industry that the best people work in (at least in Adelaide) and some sense that it was time for me to grow up and act like an adult; probably why I cut my hair and started wearing button up shirts.

It's just over 8 years since I graduated. I've never been short of work and I've had some great jobs with some great people. However, I still have a nagging regret when it comes to game programming.  I keep wondering what would have happened had I kept my sights on that goal and worked towards it. And most of all, game development is still something I really want to do.  Basically I don't want to be in the position 8 years from now where I'm wondering the same thing, only it would be even harder to do something about it.

So, this marks a turning point, my hair is long again and I prefer t-shirts.

To have any chance at a game development career, I need to learn game programming techniques, libraries and platforms, because at the moment, my game development knowledge is pretty minimal, I've spent all my time doing business/commercial development. It's not going to be easy or quick and I have a lot to learn, but really I have nothing to lose. I still need to work and make a living so I need something I can do in my spare time and with a plan that keeps me focussed. I'm going to put about 3 hours a week into building small tech demos or games that will teach me something about game programming. I'll also write a weekly blog post that outlines what I did, what I learnt and what I plan to do next week.  If I can stick to this I should learn a decent amount in a reasonable amount of time, but most importantly have a set of demos for a portfolio and a journal to go with it. And from there, we'll have to see.

Which brings me to the first little project.  I've spent a bit of time reading and thinking about where to start,  it does make sense to use Windows for the project initially though, even though I normally use a Mac and have an iPhone I could develop for, however, the games I would want to work on are PC or console games and most game jobs require C/C++ on Windows, so Windows just makes sense. I don't want to get overwhelmed and discouraged so starting reasonably small would be a good idea, which makes me think starting with XNA Game Studio is a good way to get my feet wet with XBox 360 and Windows development, rather than jumping into the deep-end with DirectX. Even if it is C# as opposed to C/C++, I'm not too worried about that just yet.

I'm going to start by developing a Breakout clone for Windows. This fits the reasonably small criteria but should cover a enough new areas that it should be interesting.  I expect to learn about at the least following:

• Setup of development environment and building and running a Windows game.
• Simple 2D graphics.
• Simple UI components.
• Simple 2D vector math, trigonometry and animation of the ball and paddle.
• Timing of animation.
• Keyboard input.
• Collision detection.
• Simple audio playback.
• Simple particle effects.

I'll be storing all the code for the project in my github account. So if anyone wants to see how I'm progressing in terms of the code, check it out. (I'll post a link to the actual repository when I get it set up next week.

That's all for this week, next week I'll post about setting up the XNA Game Studio in Windows.