So the Dark Invaders tutorial took me much longer than I anticipated.  To tell the truth I haven't quite finished yet.  I've been terribly busy with school.  I do feel confident enough to say that I think I will be expanding the game in a few ways as after going through the code and breaking it down some, it has become a little easier to understand and manipulate.

I would like to change it by:

1.)  Adding some bonuses into the mix; i.e. speed-ups, shields, double shot, etc.

2.) Adding some other types of ships to defeat.

3.) Periodically changing a background to show a planet, or something like that.

Everything that I come up with will be documented here in the Dark Experience.

Also, as somewhat of a beginner program I will mentioning some functionality and maybe expanding on some of the libraries and commands that I stumble onto.  In an effort to speed my learning efforts, I have signed on at www.cprogramming.com, and www.gamedev.net so that I can view and participate in the forums there.

-Ta

Well the shading tutorial is just full of information, and some well placed advertising for The Game Creators (but that is of no consequence).

The coding is somewhat complicated in this one...well not so much complicated as longwinded, there is a lot covered, especially if you take the time to try everything out and test a few command options out.  I personally tried all of the options mentioned in the tutorial and found it very enlightening.  I did a few extra things to the program as well.

As I was going through the Shader Tutorial I, I tried the other options for turning an object.  dbTurnObjectLeft command works perfectly, though the command seems a little awkward at first as it seems to be rotating in the wrong direction.  I quickly cleared that up for myself as the Left in the command applies to the left of the object not the viewer.  same for dbTurnObjectLeft. 

dbRotateObject( );  and dbYRotateObject(); do not, however, seem to work.  Maybe it was a problem with my instantiation, but I couldn't find a solution to that problem right away.  Not a big deal short term as there is a perfectly good function that does work the way I need.

I did think that the dbMakeObjectCube(); was pretty fun.  It was the first piece of software that really did anything visually substantial, and that wasn't designed by someone using software I'm probably not going to buy.  This got even cooler when I moved on the the advanced tutorial.  You can use similar functions for spheres and planes and I'm sure more.  

The advanced tutorial had me making a new camera and then creating a sort of picture in picture effect.  I had no idea that this concept was this ridiculously easy, I mean it was one line of code!!  Here I was thinking that the rearview mirror in all those car games was something to be put off for another day, or week, or month, when all it needs is a freakin camera!

Everything else was pretty straightforward.  In the middle of the tutorial I added a few lines of code to rotate everything.  The sphere spins left while the cube spins right.  I know its simple, but I was a little impressed.   All it took was a dbTurnObjectRight(3, 0.2);.  The Object ID three references the cube created in the sample code, and the other is the speed of rotation. 

Well, my time with the tutorials is almost at an end...and they are getting longer so the blogs are not quite as frequent.  So, after the next one this blog will become a "Development Diary", in which I will keep everyone updated on anything game related that I produce.  I will be doing all of my own modeling so I will be giving some tips from my Blender experience as well. 

More to come...:)