Programming Postmortem

Doing the programming for Time Blunders was one of the craziest things I think I've ever done.

What went right?

The game works. You can jump into the game and start playing. There are two levels that we ended up getting out of this game. I think putting everything into consideration, that's not bad. Programming-wise I believe most of the code was put together without too much of a hassle. I can definitely feel myself becoming a better programmer. Working with classes, both public and private, was something I didn't really do before. Also in the beginning there was very little global variables. Which I was always told are bad to use.



What went wrong?

As far as my position goes I don't really believe that a lot of things went wrong. I worked closely with Justin to complete this game. The main problem we had was putting our work together. We started off going line by line to check to see if the code was different on that line. That was a stupid idea. Other problems we had were just the normal things. Little glitches and annoyances that came popping up for no reason. However, that's half the fun of being the programmer. You have to deal with all the little stuff so that the game doesn't break when the player is in a crazy situation.

I was also in charge of documentation. Everything was going fine on that until the end. I bought the wrong size binder. I was at Staples picking up a binder and some of those plastic sleeves that you put the pieces of paper in to keep them all nice and neat, when I thought to myself:

"Hey Tom, I wonder if this binder is big enough?"

"Well I don't know. We do have a lot of pages."

"Hmm. Well this package of sleeves carries 200. But we're only going to need about 165 (thanks to double sided goodness). Plus these are in a cardboard box. I think if we put the sleeves in the binder and it fits we should be alright."

"That's a great idea!"

As it turns out it wasn't. The 1 inch binder was NOT big enough. Looking back on it I think to myself: "Why only 1 inch." That may be one of the stupidest decisions I've ever made. Of course that binder was going to be too small. Thanks to the smallness of the binder it made the end result look sloppy. That made me a sad panda. It was also very hard to put the little plastic sleeves in. Because all of them didn't fit well they would start sliding out whenever I opened up the little tong things to put more in.


Oh yeah, we also lost about 2 weeks of work at one point. That wasn't cool.