LIGHTSPEED TYRANNOSAURUS GAMES

Team members:

Laurence Judge - 05024056 - genuineleather(at)gmail(dot)com
Eugene Kenny - 05576750 - elkenny(at)gmail(dot)com
Oisín McDermott - 05535310 - sigmadark(at)gmail(dot)com


In the off chance that you have stumbled upon this website upon pure chance, here is a short explanation of it's purpose. In the second semester of the 7th year in the 21st century (the year of the dolphin), the three people listed above took part in a core module by the name of Software Engineering II in the faculty of Computer Science and Informatics in University College Dublin, Dublin. The module is coordinated by a JRK. The task of this module was to recreate the popular web-game called flow. The team attempted their recreation in both Java and as an application for the Nintendo DS. You decide which was more successful!





Summary of Project

When it finally came to programming on the Nintendo DS we quickly realised that it wasn't as straightforward as we were hoping or expecting. Our fist major problem was C++. It took us a long time to get used to the syntax and due to the fact we were implementing a game that was specific to the DS hardware, we later found that some valid C++ code would not compile. These libraries, which we originally judged as being simple and effective, in the long run proved to be a major fence to climb over. The internet provided our team with little to no good examples to help us implement what we hoped to achieve with the game. The documentation was quite awkward to navigate and it made us appreciate the lack of proper programming practices in Open Source/Free software projects. In fact, when we looked towards creating sound in our Nintendo DS game, we had to manipulate one of the functions in Sound.h as it wouldn't compile. Most of the time, we retreated to forums to find help where sometimes waiting for a day or two for a helpful response. The homebrew community, despite it's size, is still very very unorganised.

Our next obstacle were Vector graphics, there were no tutorials on the web on how to implement them on the NDS and most people thought we were crazy when they read our posts. This in-turn led to photoshopping images as little as 8x8 pixels and our largest being 32x32 and when imported into the game some transparenies got all muddled up and graphics had to be made from scratch. We came up with the novel idea of scaring enemies away by shouting into the DS's built in microphone, but again the library failed us as its functions for using sound were very buggy and none of the example programs we found actually ran on the hardware. It took us a long time to realise the afformentioned bug in Sound.h, everything was going wrong for no reason and we didn't know why. There was possibly a bug somewhere else in the library regarding looping sound as we could never get this to actually work.

We think we made a mistake by trying to implement the project on the DS. Originally, upon inspection the project looked very doable and we thought it a novel idea to use the stylus for control. Sadly we were wrong, even with the immensely supportful community that we discovered internet rhetoric was not reality and we constantly ran aground.

This chain of events eventually led us to focus all our efforts on our Java "mock-up".