It’s been a busy, busy week. I wish I could say that I was busy because of some cool game development action. Sadly this was not the case. For the most part I’ve been struggling just to do fun (and potentially mundane) things like checking out my twitter feed. I feel like some sort of weirdo coming along to like and retweet things that were said 18 or 20 hours ago.

That said, I did manage a little bit of development, primarily because I was turning my brain to jelly with my work project but also because I don’t want to break my blog update schedule or my vow to do at least a little game development every week no matter what.

So, what was actually accomplished? Exercise #2 was to add simple scoring to the game. To that end there is now a score variable (scoped to my package so it doesn’t leak into the browser at large) which gets reset to 0 every time the ball resets itself, and incremented by 100 for every brick broken. It’s also rendered to the screen.

This is now in place, tested, and pushed to the repository (both branches). Of course, this is by no means a large accomplishment as far as game development is concerned, but it’s still a huge step forward in my ultimate goal to actually develop games and not just wish that I was doing it, so I’m OK with that.

As I mentioned in the previous post I have switched away from WebStorm in favor of Sublime Text. This is the first game development I’ve done (or lets say, the first TypeScript development), but I’ve been using it at work for all of my coding purposes for the last week and it’s a really great fit.

I will admit that one thing that I miss from WebStorm is it’s built in git integration; in particular the fact that the gutter marks what lines are changed from what is in source control along with the ability to diff each and revert if needed. I have installed the GitGutter plugin for sublime, which shows what lines are modified, but it’s not as functional as the same feature in WebStorm.

On the other hand, I have no end of graphical diff clients to use, and if I want to get into the meat of a complicated commit with a visual diff, I have a SmartGit license, which is more than up to the task, so I’m not too disturbed.

That said, while I may be losing a bit of functionality in comparing against source control, I’m gaining a whole lot of speed in making the actual changes to begin with, and I think that’s a bigger win. I’m no longer spending so much time manually reformatting code that the WebStorm formatter has broken, for example.

I’ve been working in Objective-C for the past week (that’s what the server software I write at work is written in), but dropping into TypeScript for a little game development work was flawless. If anything slowed me down it’s that I had to reacquaint myself with what the code looks like; my brain is still set for what ts-tennis eventually looked like, but I haven’t gotten that far along in this project yet.

For the remainder of this crunch time at work, my gamedev will probably be just as minimal, but fortunately a lot of the first exercises are pretty small and simple. It’s almost like somehow Chris new I was going to get slammed at work while working with this project.

Until next week!