Any Teams/Schools Have A "Game Development" Club?

[davidthefat]

Originally Posted by davidalln

I disagree. I love the thrill I get of drawing a ship to the screen using a professionally-used API like OpenGL and watching it move across the screen. Sure, it's not too exciting, but it's there! It's something that I made!

Where do I go from there? Well, I have to make that ship shoot bullets next. And then make enemy ships, and those enemy ships have to move around with AI. And then we need to see if the bullets hit the ship. And increase the score if they do. And save the score to a high score table. And then, just for fun, set up a database online, connect to it, and make a global high score table!

See how quickly things can evolve? Don't focus on the final product: the final product isn't guaranteed. But you should be able to draw a sprite and move it across the screen; from there so much can come out of the knowledge you gained from that first step.

You ARE shooting for MIT right here, but you're working your way up. Most mortals like us have to learn step by step, gaining more and more with each tiptoe taken. You don't take a forth grader and ask her to take the derivative a logarithmic function and calculate the area under the curve. You give her years of education and experience, and then throw her in a Calculus class. Then she can apply for MIT and get in smoothly with a full ride

I see what you mean, baby steps, but I go for get the big picture, like lets say lets get the league championship, but we have to take it game by game, even play by play. I want to keep the big picture in mind, but break it up into baby steps. Thats what I think the pseudo coding period should be, plan everything out like the game theme, storyline and the code. What the audience wants, not what you want. Put it down all on paper, then have like a step by step check list that you go by. I think thats the way it should be programmed, I programmed the way you described, kind of spontaneously, I never really got that far that way, I just kept going into road blocks and had to refactor my code several times, then I would lose interest... I like working top down.