Gavin Pugh - A Videogame Programming Blog

During development, generally your testers will be running a version of the game that could be a number of days old.

By the time you’ve got back bug reports there is likely to have been significant progress on the game since. There’s every chance during interim development that bugs could have been fixed before QA found them. Also, the goalposts could be moved; some aspect of the title may have been significantly changed and that bug report you got no longer makes any sense.

For these reasons it’s imperative that when you get back bugs, you know what version of the game they were running. There’s a number of ways you can address this:

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So, I alluded to the fact I wanted to begin writing about XNA in my last post. Over the Christmas break I began getting to grips with C# and XNA, and wrote some code to have a go at prototyping a game idea I had. I think it’s pretty cool that you can execute your code on a retail 360 as well. It’s not quite as nice as using a devkit with native code, but it’s pretty close.

Note to Microsoft: Make it easier to launch the XNA connect app from the dashboard. I know it’s not meant to crash, and it doesn’t that often. But I’ve been attempting some dodgy things and I’ve had it fall over several times. It would be great if it appeared at the top of your ‘Game Library’, as the XNA apps themselves do. For the connect app I have to always scroll to the ‘community games’ section and pick it from there.

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I only ever seem to write on this blog when there’s a new GH game coming out…

That said, I’ve started to code a little in my free time. I got a block of time over the Christmas break and I decided to have a good go at doing some stuff with XNA and C#. Was a good experience, I feel a lot more comfortable with C# now. I’ve learnt to live with some of the annoying differences between it and C++. I code in the latter every day for my day job; for another language that’s so close to it, it takes a bit of a leap to leave the old ways behind.

So, hopefully I’ll give this blog a bit of a new lease of life soon with some tidbits from my XNA adventures. I’ve got a couple of ‘in-progress’ articles going already.

Anyway, Metallica… Read more »