Capstone Post 5: With a Machete

I worked a lot today. I woke up after working on capstone and then went to class and then worked on capstone and then went home quite late to write an indefinite number of blog posts (it's going to be two, counting the one before this).

A period of this particularly stuck out as the happiest. Zac and I got on the same page in terms of the new design direction of our game, discussing exactly how everything should work mechanically so I can program these things without having to make too many as-I-go-decisions. So, with this very specific approach to how everything would work, I began brain scheming and dug into the code. I knew I needed to change how things were set up because of the new design I talked about in my previous post. Having done a bit of work on it already, the architecture was headed in the direction of being a complete mess of useful code mixed in with outdated or useless code.

If you're building a house and you mess it up in the beginning it's fine; just knock down the house and start over. But if you already have the wooden frames of most of the rooms up, and you realize you put the kitchen inside the living room or something, you can't just tear down the house and start over. You tear down the studs and other wooden things and rebuild the kitchen somewhere else.

And so began the most joyous time of this night. So I got to both analyze and make changes to the existing, useful code and all that, but the code we didn't need anymore. Since we cut orbiting for cooler motion and arrows because they were lame, I had the pleasure of spending like an hour hacking through this codebase

with a machete.

As I was making boulders collide with the tail and the biomes, I came across the arrow collision code. Since we did away with the arrows, I got to select that code, and delete it. And every time I pressed that backspace key thereafter, my heart grew warmer. I fell down a beautiful rabbit hole: arrows spawn in Game Manager *SLASH!* arrows have a prefab *DELETE!* arrows have a script *NO PRISONERS*. Then I compiled, and wow look at all those lines of code that reference the arrows I had deleted out of existence. Well time for all that code to die *OVERKILL!!*.

But wait, planets still orbit and we don't want that, also the way the planets move (if at all) needs to be dictated from the BiomeProgressionManager. And so I went on to remove probably about a third of all the code in our game. It was a blast.

 Special thanks to Subversion! Without you that would have been significantly more worrisome.