MVC – Now with more V and C

The Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern is a means of separating the logic for the program data (model), the visual representation (view), and the user input (controller).  The original version of the source did not reflect this pattern very well.  While the data model was partially separated, the main game loop did most of the data update and all of the visual/controller logic.  Three new classes have been introduced, aptly named Game, Display, and Controller.  While the program will not adhere to this paradigm strictly, these changes make the source much much less confusing and therefore easier to read and understand.

Lets Git Physical!

The formerly private SVN repository of the source has been migrated to a much friendlier public github.com repository. Now everyone can get the current source!

git://github.com/jseibel/Hieratic-Attack.git

Bug down

If the level was completed while the player was in the middle of a typing challenge, the game would crash when the next level was loaded.  This was attributed to not resetting the typer object to null at the end of a level.

Level Resource

In the original design, shortcuts were taken in order to save time which were not optimal design decisions. One such mess was the way in which new levels were loaded and variables were reset and stored. Before each level, the main game loop was interrupted and variables for things such as maximum number of enemies, starting resource total, map filename, and music were set through a while loop. This made the main game loop very confusing to read and didn’t really make much sense, so a new Level class has been created to abstract the hard numbers required for each level from the accessing of those variables. Now a level is loaded by passing the level number to the load method which then reads the initial values form a text file.  This allows individual levels to be easily modified from a text file, much like the map loader.

Hello world!

The Hieratic Redux blog will serve as my development journal for an independent study in video game development with Peter H. Frohlich.  Hieratic Attack is a game developed by Be More Gamesfor 600.255 Introduction to Video Game Design.   Hieratic Attack is a a Typing Tower-Defense style game where tower placement and upgrades are influenced by the speed and accuracy of the player’s typing.  The enemies follow a defined track at varying speeds towards the player’s home base.  The object of the game is to protect your home base from the enemies through strategic use of limited resources by building and upgrading your towers.  Hieratic Attack was programmed entirely in Python with Pygame for sound and video.

Goals:

• Balance the game to make it more interesting and fun.
• Refactor the original source code for Hieratic Attack to better employ object oriented design.
• Create More thorough documentation for future reference.
• Produce an open-source, distributable version of Hieratic Attack for multiple platforms.