Tutorial schedule

While I've rambled on about Screens, Scenes and Cameras I haven't really put up any tutorials in 4 months since "Tutorial 8" and I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself.

So here's a rough TODO list, sort of making this for myself, but it's what I want to cover in detail before I get too off track here:

• Screens - a proper introduction to Screens, adding a base Screen class to the Engine


• Screen Manager - a simple little tool to help shuffle Screens around


• Scenes - like a Screen, but bigger - huge, even. I may rename Scenes to... "Worlds" or "Levels" or, something. Screens and Scenes are conceptually similar with similar names, kind of has an inherent confusion built into it


• SceneCameras - this will be the in-depth tutorial on what I've been doing lately. Cameras physically exist on Screens, and are used to peek inside of Scenes


• Automation - I have an automation system written, which I can actually take the opportunity to improve upon a little bit as I write it up here on the blog, which allows you to "script" change in game object properties over time. Things like movement, rotation, alpha (fade in/out), changing texture, scaling, stuff like that. This is a very useful for doing UI-ish tasks, like Screen transitions, but I use it for all sorts of other stuff


• SceneGraph? QuadTrees? - In a big Scene with lots and lots of game objects, for efficiency sake we will need some way to make quick collision checks between potentially thousands of objects. If a bullet is flying through a level of your game with 5,000 potential objects it could strike, you don't want to check for collision with all 5,000 objects if you can help it. I haven't tackled this yet so it's coming up next on my R&D list


• AI - Another R&D project


• Level Generation - I've been reading up a little on algorithms for creating random mazes, it's kind of interesting and thankfully not too complicated. I'll use it in the Star Maze project


• Sound - I'm assuming this won't be too difficult to implement (famous last words)


• Star Maze - take everything covered and use it to re-create a classic 2D game


• And beyond that... - like most wanna-be game hobbyists I have an ambitious vaporware project I want to turn into a reality. But first I'll create Star Maze, get some good practice there, and if all goes well we can start to tinker around with other things

So that's the plan. There's no ETA :)