Monday 28th

Started cleaning up my working directory and sorting out various files and images for the project; my projects always begin very haphazardly, as I throw files into the game folder just to get stuff working. However, the FishEd project taught me an awful lot about staying organised and filing things in their proper place.

Did a small amount of tinkering with the game: I noticed that the status display I'd mocked up was obscuring a little too much of the playing area. The solution, that of making the lower parts of the status display smaller, was relatively quick, but the status did seem to lose some of its appeal (such is the often case in artistic endeavours). The remainder of today's session was spent sketching out ideas on my trusty notepad, which included some rather tasty new weapon ideas. :)

Sunday 27th

Managed to get the OO stuff working today in about 20 minutes (one of those classic situations where taking a break from coding will actually help in the long run). I'd also made a couple of silly errors while transposing code from Blitz+, so there was plenty of head-slapping amidst the cheers. Rounded of the day's session by going through my huge collection of fonts to find something suitable for the game.

Saturday 26th

Today is the semi-unofficial start date fro the Citadel project (unofficial because I was supposed to be writing the game two years ago!). I already had a very rough framework set up in Blitz Max, but today I set about going through some OO tutorials to learn the ins and outs of types, methods, and things of that ilk.

I've always hated the initial stages of learning a new language, even though I know that perseverance reaps its own rewards. After about 4 hours glued to the PC, I finally began adding type-based bullet code to my existing scroller. And, naturally, the bloody thing didn't work...