5.3. S ECTION R OUNDUP Exploration of project hand-in and section roundup

In lecture exploration of answers to frequently asked student questions

Exploration of the Week 6 Exploratory Milestone

Remember this is not a binding contract – it is intended to help you plan and manage your development. Question 1: If your game has evolved and changed from that reported in the Week 2 proposal, then please provide details here of the change, including any update to the core, desirable and optional functionality. To do: Complete questions

Initial time estimates tend to be optimistic and rarely realised. Experience (sometimes bitter) enables better estimates! Question 2: Identify the items of core, desirable or optional functionality that you plan to have developed for the Week 9 Alpha Milestone and provide a rough development timeline

Question 3: Please identify any questions, areas, problems, topics, etc. that you would like me to provide explicit feedback on within the audio feedback. Please do identify any specific areas of concern or uncertainty on which you would like to receive feedback.

Mid-way awards

The first lecture on Week 7 will be an awards ceremony (a bit of fun) based on the Week 6 Exploratory Milestone submission. A number of different prize categories can/may be recognised and rewarded, as follows:

Most authentic rendition of a classic computer game Most original/fun game design or game play idea Game I least want to present at the Board of Examiners

Most comprehensive game design including development plan and contingency planning. Game with the best title Game with the most inappropriate title

Submission with the most impressive exploratory code Aside: There actually will be prizes!

Overview of debugging advice

Debugging in games is often hard: Update/draw process happens very frequently and quickly (~60 times second, 17ms per tick). It can be hard to reason about what is happening. A lot of the available debugging tools cannot be easily applied to games (including GPU interaction)

Thou shalt have a clear understanding of what should happen This may be obvious, but sometimes people start debugging without a clear understanding of what should happen. Thou shalt reproduce the problem consistently It is much easier to debug and test a problem that can be consistently reproduced, although sometimes this is not realistically achieveable. Thou shalt test your assumptions Debugging is a process of identifying your assumptions (this can be hard) and then testing to see if they hold.

Thou shalt divide and conquer In order to manage game complexity, ‘high-level’ assumptions should be firstly checked to enable the search to be constrained. Thou shalt think and look Debugging is a process of identifying an assumption and then checking the code (log file, debugger, print statements) to test that assumption. Thou shalt change on thing at a time When testing changes to a program, only one factor should be changed at a time to limit interdependency.

Thou shalt keep an audit trail Either using code versioning (or pen & paper and simple backups), keep a record of changes made to the program Thou shalt thoroughly test the correction The correction should be tested to ensure the original problem has been fixed with no impact on existing working components. Thou shalt not let the problem unfixed Ignoring a problem only increases the new bug complexity and can introduce later problems or introduce dependency upon the buggy code.

To do: Bring together explored material to progress design and develop code Develop work plan for next week Work towards completing hand-in Today we explored: Information to be submitted for the Week 6 Handin Useful approach towards game debugging