Finishing touches

I've come to the point in Tetris where I normally move on to the next project: the finishing touches.

I've got the gameplay mechanics sorted, the visuals look passable (I'm not really putting much effort into visuals at the moment as these are just learning games, but I've tried to make sure they don't look too amateur). What's missing are little things like a high scores page, a different game mode that lets you see how many points you can score in a given time period, things like that.

I'm not the kind of person who is driven by finishing every minute detail. Its one of the reasons my code is never very good as far as error handling is concerned. But if I ever want a comercially released game I'm going to have to get better at it, and so I'm persevering with Tetris. By the end of the day I'll have a High scores table, a couple of game modes, and decent 'you won'/ 'you lost' screens.

And then I'll call it a day and move on to the next learning game: PacMan! I'm going to spend some time abstracting out the reusable code from the Tetris tile engine, as both PacMan, and the next game, a Mario clone, will use it in one form or another.

I'm still waiting for James Silva's book to arrive, but when it does I'll be working through that as well, and probably refactoring some of my engine code as a result. I also want to get started on my 2D rendering engine. At the moment all of my different game components use a seperate SpriteBatch to draw to the screen. Its not a big deal now, but if I start having a lot of sprites on the screen (including say some particle effects) the draw calls might start hurting performance.

Anyway, that's it for this update, more soon I hope.