Whatever happened to that community game jam we were talking about?

At 3/7/13 01:46 PM, egg82 wrote:

At 3/7/13 01:23 PM, Rustygames wrote: Usually this is what happens after coding for hours and then compiling:
http://www.topito.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/code-12.gif

haha, yupp. This is why I unit-test the ever-living hell out of everything as i'm creating it. It's slow, but generally bug-free.

The drive for unit testing at my work has increased massively, I've not done it as a rule for every project so I'm not that experienced with it. When you say you unit test everything, do you just mean the business logic behind the code? Because I'm not entirely sure what would even be unit testable in such a graphically rich application (such as a game). Could you give some examples of what you would apply unit tests to?

At 3/7/13 01:23 PM, Rustygames wrote: Usually this is what happens after coding for hours and then compiling:
http://www.topito.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/code-12.gif

Haha, normally that's what happens, but I was in the zone for whatever reason.

At 3/7/13 03:28 PM, Archawn wrote: Whatever happened to that community game jam we were talking about?

I think we voted on having another jam before Tom does his dev tool jams (construct, stencyl, etc). Not sure what happened then. I remember you and I said March 9 and April 20 were good for both of us. The 9th is probably too soon at this point, plus we lose an hour from daylight saving time.

At 3/7/13 04:39 PM, Rustygames wrote: The drive for unit testing at my work has increased massively, I've not done it as a rule for every project so I'm not that experienced with it. When you say you unit test everything, do you just mean the business logic behind the code? Because I'm not entirely sure what would even be unit testable in such a graphically rich application (such as a game). Could you give some examples of what you would apply unit tests to?

well, I don't generally have just one test I run through my entire game. While i'm building functions, I test out different oddball parameters that can go into it or use different variables it takes from the class. Then I stress-test and optimize some. After the class is done, I put it in some real-world scenarios and then stress-test with some extreme scenarios. I try to put in anything I think could possibly break it or spit out weird shit. Throughout the process of creating a small class i'll have run it roughly 20 times, depending.

Once a state is finished, I run it and click ALL the things.

I apply unit tests to anything I can. If it takes input in any form, i'll change to make sure it doesn't break or do something weird later on. Sometimes testing means throwing in different parameters, and sometimes it means letting it run for a few minutes, cycling as fast as it can without crashing.

As an example, I developed a file for generating pseudo-random numbers. I stress-tested the seed values as well as let it run at top speed for several minutes, trying to find duplicates or seeing if it crashes when not finding an unused number.
Turns out, inifnity's pretty big, so I didn't have to worry about crashes.

At 3/7/13 03:28 PM, Archawn wrote: Whatever happened to that community game jam we were talking about?

I love game jams, one of my best peojects was for the Global Games Jam. Blueberry is my favorite.

At 3/7/13 04:39 PM, Rustygames wrote: The drive for unit testing at my work has increased massively

Idiot here; what is unit testing?

At 3/7/13 05:25 PM, GeoKureli wrote:

At 3/7/13 03:28 PM, Archawn wrote: Whatever happened to that community game jam we were talking about?

I love game jams, one of my best peojects was for the Global Games Jam. Blueberry is my favorite.

At 3/7/13 04:39 PM, Rustygames wrote: The drive for unit testing at my work has increased massively

Idiot here; what is unit testing?

Automated tests you run on a function or class. You should write the tests first then write the code to pass the tests, it's called test driven development and it's a way of ensuring your code is as bug free as possible and stays that way (any time you change anything you can just run the suite of tests again)

At 3/7/13 05:35 PM, Rustygames wrote: Automated tests you run on a function or class. You should write the tests first then write the code to pass the tests, it's called test driven development and it's a way of ensuring your code is as bug free as possible and stays that way (any time you change anything you can just run the suite of tests again)

unit tests don't necessarily need to be automated, but they generally are.
Thing is, with games it's very hard to create a suite of tests and run the game through them because it's so dynamic. You pretty much just need to do it the "old fashioned" way.

At 3/7/13 05:35 PM, Rustygames wrote: Automated tests you run on a function or class. You should write the tests first then write the code to pass the tests, it's called test driven development and it's a way of ensuring your code is as bug free as possible and stays that way (any time you change anything you can just run the suite of tests again)

Ok, I usually have a test project that I use to debug new features I'm implementing into an engine, unless it's really small, then I'll just add it to the main constructor of my current project along with the traces.

At 3/7/13 05:42 PM, egg82 wrote:

At 3/7/13 05:35 PM, Rustygames wrote: Automated tests you run on a function or class. You should write the tests first then write the code to pass the tests, it's called test driven development and it's a way of ensuring your code is as bug free as possible and stays that way (any time you change anything you can just run the suite of tests again)

unit tests don't necessarily need to be automated, but they generally are.
Thing is, with games it's very hard to create a suite of tests and run the game through them because it's so dynamic. You pretty much just need to do it the "old fashioned" way.

Yup. You can use stuff like selenium (not sure if it has flash API's, but I'm sure you could do something similar) for graphical testing, but this is only going to work for a few cases in the average game, most of it will have to be tested by humans (imo)

Oh my god. Are we discussing TDD in here ? Is this the enterprise software engineering forum now. What's next ? Wanna talk about deployment and automation strategies ? :P

At 3/7/13 09:10 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: Oh my god. Are we discussing TDD in here ? Is this the enterprise software engineering forum now. What's next ? Wanna talk about deployment and automation strategies ? :P

This is the everything forum :)

Side note: my writer sent the cutscene stuff over today, and tbh I'm kinda bummed that I know how the storyline goes. It's been a surprise up until now, and I didn't get to experience it by playing the game :(

At 3/7/13 09:10 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: Oh my god. Are we discussing TDD in here ? Is this the enterprise software engineering forum now. What's next ? Wanna talk about deployment and automation strategies ? :P

Actually now you mention it, does anyone use any automated build processes here?
I've been using a simple ant script to do a few bits and bobs for my current project

At 3/8/13 12:45 PM, Rustygames wrote: Actually now you mention it, does anyone use any automated build processes here?
I've been using a simple ant script to do a few bits and bobs for my current project

aside from using pre-made compilers, all I do is create flexible classes that I can use later. That's as automated as I get.

I know this is kinda the game dev thread, but on the topic of Newgrounds Flash I just stumbled across this panel with hotdiggedydemon and egoraptor.

I am obssessed with Arin, but I am abhorrently, grotesquely obssessed with Max. He's a fucking giant prick in this video, and Arin's especially nice, which is hilarious.
Everyone says they love arin and hate max, and it's TRULY HEARTBREAKING TO WATCH!
If I was there I'd give them shit for not posting on Newgrounds any more.

Speaking of Newgrounds I've got a post about why Newgrounds is the best flash game site in the chamber, and I MIGHT enter the "make a Newgrounds ad" contest.

At 3/8/13 12:45 PM, Rustygames wrote: Actually now you mention it, does anyone use any automated build processes here?
I've been using a simple ant script to do a few bits and bobs for my current project

I've been using Java quite a bit for robotics stuff and it got to the point where generating and distributing code/documentation between collaborators (even with the help of GitHub) became a pain. I modified the ANT build script for our project to call a shell script to generate and publish our javadoc and commit and push our code every time we compiled and downloaded to the robot. Very useful, I'm getting into scripty-type things and they're a blast to play with. (plus they certainly make life a whole lot easier)

At 3/8/13 03:17 PM, I-smel wrote: Speaking of Newgrounds I've got a post about why Newgrounds is the best flash game site in the chamber, and I MIGHT enter the "make a Newgrounds ad" contest.

Ad contest? Where?

At 3/8/13 09:39 PM, egg82 wrote: Ad contest? Where?

http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1328768

At 3/8/13 09:22 PM, Archawn wrote: I modified the ANT build script for our project to call a shell script to generate and publish our javadoc and commit and push our code every time we compiled and downloaded to the robot.

Interesting. I think I will consider looking into something like this in the future. That is something I have always found tedious is remembering to actually push the code to git >_>

At 3/8/13 09:22 PM, Archawn wrote:

At 3/8/13 12:45 PM, Rustygames wrote: Actually now you mention it, does anyone use any automated build processes here?
I've been using a simple ant script to do a few bits and bobs for my current project

I've been using Java quite a bit for robotics stuff and it got to the point where generating and distributing code/documentation between collaborators (even with the help of GitHub) became a pain. I modified the ANT build script for our project to call a shell script to generate and publish our javadoc and commit and push our code every time we compiled and downloaded to the robot. Very useful, I'm getting into scripty-type things and they're a blast to play with. (plus they certainly make life a whole lot easier)

I'm using it for a similar thing really, I've got some server side java stuff, a couple of xml files and a flash. One ANT script compiles and uploads everything I need to test and also pops up a little firefox window with a couple of swf's set to auto login. It used to take me 5 minutes to do all that every time I wanted to run the code, so a 5 second script was a huge productivity boost for me :)

Since we actually are talking about deployment and automation now, I am not the biggest ANT/Maven fan. I think I would prefer to write a build script on my own with Ruby, or Node. In terms of deployment, I've had good luck with capistrano. :)

Lets not talk about deployment. lets talk about projects we are working on, and fun stuff.
http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/4cd9bc6174cb3b5e15102c34 c868a589
Here's my rhythm baseball game that you guys should totally play. just click the random level button, don't worry about the rest.
UP - jump
DOWN - duck under shit
LEFT - swing
RIGHT - break rocks

At 3/9/13 08:05 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: Since we actually are talking about deployment and automation now, I am not the biggest ANT/Maven fan. I think I would prefer to write a build script on my own with Ruby, or Node. In terms of deployment, I've had good luck with capistrano. :)

I'm getting sick of wrapping calls to other languages inside of calls to other languages inside of calls to other languages...

At 3/9/13 08:49 PM, GeoKureli wrote: Lets not talk about deployment. lets talk about projects we are working on, and fun stuff.

I think deployment is fun stuff for them

Weirdos

At 3/9/13 08:49 PM, GeoKureli wrote: Lets not talk about deployment. lets talk about projects we are working on, and fun stuff.
http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/4cd9bc6174cb3b5e15102c34 c868a589
Here's my rhythm baseball game that you guys should totally play. just click the random level button, don't worry about the rest.
UP - jump
DOWN - duck under shit
LEFT - swing
RIGHT - break rocks

Veryy coool. I like it alot! keep up the good work. I think the animation for breaking the rocks should be a stand up shoulder smash. The slide smash seems like you could use that to slide under the high blocks. Its looking good.

Here is what I have been working on for far to long. This is just a demo and only includes one level that repeats over and over.

HERE IS THE DEMO

for some reason it does not work right in dumping grounds so you'll have to download it. Why is it not working on dumping grounds?? It works fine locally when i run it in browsers and straight in Flash Player.

At 3/10/13 12:05 AM, swishcheese wrote: for some reason it does not work right in dumping grounds so you'll have to download it. Why is it not working on dumping grounds?? It works fine locally when i run it in browsers and straight in Flash Player.

Does it connect to something, like ng api or something? That kind of stuff doesn't work in the dump. Try creating a project and uploading it to the preview there. Or maybe it loads files or something

At 3/10/13 12:05 AM, swishcheese wrote: Here is what I have been working on for far to long. This is just a demo and only includes one level that repeats over and over.

HERE IS THE DEMO

for some reason it does not work right in dumping grounds so you'll have to download it. Why is it not working on dumping grounds?? It works fine locally when i run it in browsers and straight in Flash Player.

I. Fucking. Love. Push block puzzles! Can't wait to see the finished game. how do I get passed the 2 portals 3 rows down from the top?

It would be nice if I moved left when I tap left, instead of turning that direction and having to press it again

At 3/10/13 12:31 AM, GeoKureli wrote:

At 3/10/13 12:05 AM, swishcheese wrote: Here is what I have been working on for far to long. This is just a demo and only includes one level that repeats over and over.

HERE IS THE DEMO

for some reason it does not work right in dumping grounds so you'll have to download it. Why is it not working on dumping grounds?? It works fine locally when i run it in browsers and straight in Flash Player.

I. Fucking. Love. Push block puzzles! Can't wait to see the finished game. how do I get passed the 2 portals 3 rows down from the top?

It would be nice if I moved left when I tap left, instead of turning that direction and having to press it again

Thanks Man!! :D the problem with the tap left move left is there is situations in the game where you want to shoot left but not move left and you are not facing left.

here is picture trying to explain how to beat it

ohhh and z to stab, x to shoot, and once you get it c to grapnel hook.

and MSGhero, Thats the weird thing. Im not using NG API or loading files. Everything in Embedded. Im not sure what the problem is. Im using FlashDevelop using its default preloader class. Could that be an issue??

At 3/10/13 12:43 AM, swishcheese wrote: Thanks Man!! :D the problem with the tap left move left is there is situations in the game where you want to shoot left but not move left and you are not facing left.

gotcha. The thing is 90% of the game is moving, so easy moving controls should really have priority. what if you held space to lock your position and turn with arrows, or you hold attack and press a direction to attack? neither of my ideas are that great, but I would still prefer it to tapping twice to move. given how often I'm zig zagging in the game. just a thought

here is picture trying to explain how to beat it

ah it seems so obvious now.

and MSGhero, Thats the weird thing. I'm not using NG API or loading files. Everything in Embedded. Im not sure what the problem is. Im using FlashDevelop using its default preloader class. Could that be an issue??

maybe you're only checking if its loaded once at the beginning, then it would only work locally even when it is tested locally on a browser.

At 3/10/13 01:07 AM, GeoKureli wrote:

At 3/10/13 12:43 AM, swishcheese wrote: Thanks Man!! :D the problem with the tap left move left is there is situations in the game where you want to shoot left but not move left and you are not facing left.

gotcha. The thing is 90% of the game is moving, so easy moving controls should really have priority. what if you held space to lock your position and turn with arrows, or you hold attack and press a direction to attack? neither of my ideas are that great, but I would still prefer it to tapping twice to move. given how often I'm zig zagging in the game. just a thought

Yeah, That is a good idea! I was actually thinking of having an option menu for key binding and what not. I will definitely add that to the options as well!

maybe you're only checking if its loaded once at the beginning, then it would only work locally even when it is tested :locally on a browser.

Hmmm. I have other files i uploaded with same preloader now thinking of it. And it does get to the sponsor intro after the preloader. I tried taking out the sponsor intro and its still not working. Im sure I'll figure it out later on (hopefully).

At 3/9/13 08:05 PM, PrettyMuchBryce wrote: Since we actually are talking about deployment and automation now, I am not the biggest ANT/Maven fan. I think I would prefer to write a build script on my own with Ruby, or Node. In terms of deployment, I've had good luck with capistrano. :)

Using something a lot of people use and has a lot of documentation is desirable over a custom solution because it's easier for people to learn (and they might already know it) when you add people to a team or company which uses it. It's why PureMVC is very appealing to me.

And ha ha we tricked you into talking about it! :D

At 3/10/13 09:58 AM, Rustygames wrote: Using something a lot of people use and has a lot of documentation is desirable over a custom solution because it's easier for people to learn (and they might already know it) when you add people to a team or company which uses it. It's why PureMVC is very appealing to me.

And ha ha we tricked you into talking about it! :D

I hear what you're saying there. If you want to talk about skills that will add value to your career then I definitely wouldn't put anything related to flash on that list over the long term. Everything you know about flash will most likely be completely useless in 10 years, unless you find yourself maintaining legacy code or in some really niche situation.