So crappy, it's good!

This past term, I’ve been attending a game development night course offered by UW. It’s actually a four term course, and tonight is the final class of the first term. Our last assignment (which is due today) was to take our existing framework and create a game out of it. This was assigned to us the week before Thanksgiving, so we’ve had nearly a month to work on it… I started last night.

Since I knew that I would never touch this codebase again, I hacked it to bits. This was a pretty new experience for me and I realized that you actually have to be fairly good at coding to write code this bad. By that I mean, bad code usually makes buggy programs, but if you can hack your code in and get a solid program out of it, you must know what you’re doing.

So, last night I got the core gameplay finished, but there was no ending to the game (a la Atari 2600 games). Since I knew that my work was nearly done, I did what any good procrastinator would do… I stopped working on it. I was getting sleepy, so I went to bed with the plan to get up a little early the next morning and finish it before work. This morning I awoke with the determination that comes only with a deadline so looming that (to quote the poetic lyricists of Metallica) “nothing else matters.”

My main problem this morning was I needed to quickly add beginning and end menus to the game, but I didn’t have the time to learn DirectX text stuff. I decided that I’d go with the super cheesy and quick solution of message boxes!! (they’re good for everything!) Once I hacked in a scoring system and header & footer message boxes I was done!! Download my game from here if you want to see it in all its wondrous crappy glory. A few notes, you’ll need at least DirectX 7.0, and you control the tank with the mouse. If you can’t get it to run, oh well, you aren’t missing much.