Thank you!

That’s really all I can say at this point. Almost 800 views on the page, and over 150 plays.

C0D3 started as a little project for myself and a couple of my friends. But lately I have gotten a lot of positive feedback, and I love seeing that people are actually able to solve the crazy stupid puzzles I have come up with. Over the last 2 months I have been more motivated to work on the game than ever. And that even though I started working and have much less time.

So yeah, thank you for all the feedback and support, and I hope you can bare with me for a little longer until the new version comes out. Following is a little update on what I have been up to.

The End is in sight

Don’t worry, it is not quite here yet. But I have made a good few ideas on paper by now, as to where the game is going. I put a lot of thought into a story going along with the game. Being subtly told next to all the puzzling and guessing. I already have hints of it in the game as it is now, but with the next version there will be a good bit more of that.

While planning out the direction of the game and the way it will end I came to the realization, that by now I have almost 60% of the puzzles already in place. And I already have a good few more in the pipeline. This has let me to the decision, that there won’t be a Version 0.5. Because that would basically be the Version I have right now with all the code changes, which don’t really add anything to the game. Instead the next release will be Version 0.6.
I am pretty certain that I will manage to release it this month. So yeah, stay tuned for that.

Clean Code

So it has again been a while since my last update, but a lot has changed. Well not really, but let me explain.

I have recently started working for a bigger IT company. My first experience when it comes to working in big teams. And as one of my first tasks I was asked to read a book. Not just any book though, no. Clean Code by Robert C. Martin.
And boy was that a read. I can only recommend reading it to any programmer out there. Maybe not if you are only just learning to code, but if you have a bit of experience go for it.
I basically finished the book in a little under 3 days and then decided, that I would have to do some work on the code of C0D3. So that is what I went on to do. I refactored big parts of the code. In the end nothing changes game-play wise, but I will now be able to add new content much faster and with less bugs. If you are interested in the changes in some more detail you can read on, otherwise the last paragraph might be a bit boring for you.

Code Changes in Numbers

You might think why would I invest over 5 weeks time in just redoing what I already did. Well I hope after reading this you will have some understanding.
I started C0D3 as a small project with no real goal. But the more I kept working on it, the more features I thought of and the more complex it got.
One of the biggest problems I had was, that I had one Class handling most of, if not all of the game Functionality. By version 0.4 of the game this class was well over 8500 lines. As you can imagine finding a certain passage in the code could be quite time consuming. So the first thing I did was moving the Functionality of each of the ‘.exe’ files that you can open in the game into seperate classes. These classes are fused through an Interface which my main class could now use.
This was probably already the most time consuming part, and I ended up with over 50 new classes and with around 6000 lines less code in the main class.
The next step then was to rewrite the way the game-state is represented. This again removed around 500 lines of code from the main class and resulted in a much easier, and much more accessible way of persisting the players progress.
After that I made a similar change for handling and managing the trophies in the game which once again gave me around 500 lines of code less. And lastly I cleaned up the code in general and put some text manipulation algorithms into separate classes which once again cleared up over 500 lines of code.
In the end the main class is now well under 1000 lines of code and the code is much cleaner than it used to be. I am not claiming it is perfect, but it is much nicer to work with.

So yeah. Cleaning can be fun, and also really really effective.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for Version 0.6!