Wasting Time Trying to Be Fancy

Month Four : Week Two

This week I got myself stuck in a hole trying to use the backbone of the already created Gateware Demo Application to create my new Demo app, phasing out SDL_2 and replacing it with GWindow. I wanted to use as much of the old code as I could because it had an animating sprite, used great separation of concerns and displayed smart use of OOP principles which would give an end-user a great example for the kind of game that could benefit from our libraries. Unfortunately, the more code I copied over and used, the more I began to realize it may not work. The whole architecture of the program was so dependent on SDL that my stripped down GWindow library couldn't be sufficiently worked into the flow of the program without a serious amount of changes. This meant I would have little time to start something new AND learn some OpenGL to render some test shape myself.

At this point I had wasted too much time on the App, and needed to get something working ASAP.  Luckily, my teammate Andre was working on making his first month code deliverable by rendering a shape on screen in OpenGL. I decided to work with him and use the rendering functionality of his much simpler demo app and then integrate the Gateware libraries into it. I realized it was more important for the end-user to see how the libraries work in the demo App than worry about animations and sprites and time like the older demo App did. In the end the App came out better and more cross-platform ready that the old App would have been, and was completed in half the time.