Tutorial Writing Competition

[chronozphere]

I feel like writing a tutorial on tool development. Each medium/large project needs tools to support it and to let other users create new content/maps. I'm working on my Spline Editor now so I can use my experiences to write an article that will give you some insight in how I did it and what kind of approach is best to get a nice extensible map/content editor working in no time.

Does anyone else feel like writing an article? I'd like a bit of competition...

[code_glitch]

Hehe, that last post by WILL about writing everything leading up your tut only just hit home... I think it would indeed help if I did not have to include links to basic pascal stuff, setting up an IDE, compiler and runtime also... It is a bit of a pain and yhou do lose focus from what you want to write about when you have to include lines to try and cover every eventuality. Any volunteers on how to get everything working up wo and including a basic sdl test program? It would help a ton with my pong tutorial.

Oh and, chrono (cant spell the rest right, sorry ) if you want some competition, how many articles can you publish before Pong goes live? It might take a few weeks of fine tuning my odt file on my HD (no offence, but I cant to extended writing in the online editor) since all but the most insignificant bugs and gameplay issues have now been solved. Looks like you get the first in new gamedev tuts soon WILL

[dazappa]

SDL headers are included in the FPC/Laz distribution, so it's as simple as including it and putting the libs in the directory where your binary is. (and then of course, having a basic code structure for it)

[code_glitch]

And if you only use FPC not lazarus? Kind of like I do... for everything... Although on windows you need the dlls and in ubuntu and other linux distros you will need to install the libsdl-dev and libsdl packages to get things to run and compile...

[chronozphere]

Oh and, chrono (cant spell the rest right, sorry ) if you want some competition, how many articles can you publish before Pong goes live?

Pong??!? your'e kidding right?

I'd rather have a competition about quality than quantity, because I am too busy to spend time writing multiple articles.

[code_glitch]

Oh lol.. haha, no I'm not kidding. As part of a scheme to get new game tuts out there I figured we might start with good ol' retro games that are simple and pong came to mind. On the plus side it had its re-advertising campaign in the wall-e movie so its not really lost and forgotten.

Srsly tough, once the basic tut is done, I'm going to do a particle fx, animation and etc tutorial for prometheus because who can be bothered writing particle fx and all that from scratch again when you have engine at hand?

But yea, I get the point: quality is better then quantity. 1.44mb of some linux os can get you a desktop, or you could have 20gb of windoze.

[WILL]

Retro games (Pong, Super Mario Bros., Snake, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Missile Command) are great for beginner game programming tutorials as they teach basic concepts without a whole lot of advanced concepts getting in the way. Small building blocks will feel more rewarding and have a greater effect over time.