beginning – Chris Code

Introduction

I’ve started building my first open source project back in November 2017. I actually thought to write it for fun, I didn’t know that I’ll be extending this idea, It was supposed to be a 30 min project. But many ideas came to my mind and this is how it’s started. Also, Pixi (this is how I named it) was a closed-source at first.

Heavy Squares.

When I was learning Microsoft’s GUI Framework called WPF I decided to make a very simple program to color pixels on click. Yes. Something very similar to MS Paint, but on a smaller scale, like a 3×3 grid. This idea came to me when I was reading about rectangles from WPF’s toolbox. Young stupid me thought “What if I’ll connect 9 rectangles and color them on click”. I quickly started to construct my brilliant idea. It was working. I can even say, that it was working perfectly. But don’t forget that it was just 9 rectangles. I saw potential in this project, so I started expanding it. This is when It’s getting funny, when canvas with squares began to be bigger (1024×1024 for instance) program was eating resources like stupid. A huge amount of ram (about 3 GB) just to create a 1024×1024 grid with squares. And of course, the code was messy too.

Refactoring

I started having troubles in understanding what was going on in the code. It was caused by my unconcern. Quality of code caused my fear to do any changes, so I stopped working on Pixi for half a year. After that time I got motivated again, and I started refactoring the code. In fact it wasn’t refactoring, it was rewriting program from scratch. I took me about a month to finish rewriting it, I’ll write more about refactoring in other post.

How it started

As I mentioned in My programming story I made a game. Bad one of course, but from scratch, by myself. And it was a HUGE milestone to me. It was the time when I stopped copying the code from videos/articles and built something mine. It’s worth to notice that I was 13 years old while building this game.

What was it about?

It is a labyrinth game called Potato Labyrinth, where you move a guy that is a potato (literally) to find a way to the exit. But it isn’t all. There are “fancy” mechanics in it, like portals, gates and I even made a dark level, where you only can see a few meters away.

Building

I made this game using Unity game engine and C# programming language, It’s a really powerful piece of software. Here is a short snippet of the game code that is responsible for the pause menu:

public class PauseMenu : MonoBehaviour {
    public GameObject pauseMenu;
    public static bool pauseMenuActive = false;
    // Use this for initialization
    void Start()
    {
        pauseMenu.SetActive(false);
    }

    // Update is called once per frame
    void Update()
    {
        if (Input.GetKeyUp(KeyCode.Escape)&&pauseMenuActive == false)
        {
            pauseMenu.SetActive(true);
            pauseMenuActive = true;
        }
        else if (Input.GetKeyUp(KeyCode.Escape)&&pauseMenuActive==true)
        {
            pauseMenu.SetActive(false);
            pauseMenuActive = false;
        }    
    }
   public void BackToMenu()
    {
        SceneManager.LoadScene("Menu");
        Points.points = 0;
        LevelPointsRequired.activelvl = 1;
        pauseMenuActive = false;

    }
}

The code is terrible, as you can see, but it was my first true creation.

Summary

My first game was a bad one, but that’s okay! Everybody has to start somewhere, even a bad game like that is the next step for something better, bigger and more ambitious. I’ve decided to share this game if you want to check it out here.

Category: beginning

My first open source project