4th Devlog - Graphics!

Been pretty busy the past few days because of work and moving into uni but I’m all moved in now, and have time to code for a bit again

Features:

• UI that scales with screen resolution
• DAS system
• High score tracking
• Play again after game over
• Able to use the color orange now

Stuff I learned:

• Writing to and reading from files
• Using raylib for:
• Input handling
• Text and graphics rendering
• Static vs dynamic linking

Biggest Challenge:
When I first built the game for windows and sent it to my friend to try it, it just didn’t work at all, and it took me forever to figure that it was dynamically linking raylib, so anybody running it needed to have raylib installed, but I eventually figured out how to get it to static link

Third Devlog - Tetris in C!

This one took me a while
(My favorite bugs I encountered are attached)

It has:

• Game logic and Rendering in separate files
• Bag Randomizer for more fair pieces
• Ghost display of where your block is going to fall
• Different colors for almost every piece (no orange)
• Wall kicks when rotating

Stuff I learned:

• Using calloc() instead of malloc()
• When to actually use the & operator
• Using a struct to save the game state
• More gdb debugging
• Writing to a debug log file since I cant print to terminal while using ncurses
• Extern keyword when saving read only data in another file

Biggest challenge:
Debugging different logic errors was really hard, since there’s just so many more different spots where the code can go wrong when handling memory yourself
(out of bounds arrays don’t always crash, they can sometimes just give you random data)

Second devlog, I remade snake in the terminal

It plays just like classic snake, supporting wasd and arrow keys, hitting yourself or the walls kills you, and eating an apple increases your score and you grow

Acquired knowledge

• debugging with gdb (very useful)
• using curses libraries for terminal drawing and input
• managing support for windows and Linux at the same time using #ifdef
• managing a game loop

Biggest challenge

The biggest challenge was that I kept assuming that uninitialized variables would default to 0 like in other languages, but in C they become whatever was last in that memory, so random garbage

First devlog, lots of progress

I learned about stardance midway through this, so this is really long.
Basically, I have never touched Linux, C, or C++ before this, and I am going to learn the language while using Linux (wsl2), and make a hopefully good game by the end of it

Everything I’ve made so far, in chronological order, and what i learned:

Calculator

• strings aren’t real??
• how to receive arguments
• & (address of) operator
• string formatting
• long vs long long

Rock Paper Scissors

• how to use enums
• how pointers work
• * (pointer dereference) operator
• printf
• random number generation

String Library

• void pointers
• string operations
• loop through a string
• creating a header file

Vector (c++ std::vector/dynamic array)

• bools also aren’t real????
• memory allocation/reallocation and freeing
• more pointer practice, starting to get it
• what size_t is

Linked List

• structs
• more complex memory allocation and freeing
• how to make a ton of memory leaks
• more pointer practice, I think I understand itnow

HashMap

• output pointers (void double pointers??)
• hash function
• more complex logic
• moving every value safely when resizing the hashmap