Welcome to the latest installment of the Flax HTML5 Game Engine Development Diary. Its been over a month since our last diary which, to be honest, I am not happy with, though the life of second year student game developer can be fairly hectic. We received four projects in the last week or two, which comprise of a remake of the lunar lander arcade game in OpenGL due before Christmas, A 3D jetpack game in OGRE, a software engineering project based on Battleships, in which we practice the methods and processes of the Unified Process. Last, but sadly not least, a demo reel in Flash of a past game project. That added with continuous tests in programming, applied physics, software engineering, et cetera. Luckily, I love it all, but it still requires massive amounts of time and effort. If anyone is interested in hearing about these projects, let us know. Carl will be doing a post in the next few weeks on the OpenGL lunar lander project I think, if he ever gets around to doing some work.

Flax Engine Status

So when will we see some screenshots or demos?

I have seen quite a few people asking that. Again it all comes down to the software development process we took at the beginning of the project, which was essentially the waterfall model. Though it was an unknown mistake on our part, I think it was worthwhile. It has really illustrated to me why the waterfall model of software development is not a good choice. The disadvantages are plainly obvious in this project, we spent way to much time trying to document the engine in a strict fashion and as a result we don’t have a working build showing off the work on a frequent basis, like you would in an Agile approach to software development. Code and requirements are always evolving and changing so our process must be flexible to allow these changes.

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After a few software engineering lectures this year we soon realized that taking an iterative, evolutionary and agile approach to software development is much more productive and in my opinion provides more motivation for a project. Acomplising small modular task in short peiord of time with a working feature at the end I find keeps our motivation up. Our software engineering lecture, Dr. Christophe Meudec, is currently covering the Unified Process in detail which we are integrating into the way we develop the Flax Engine. Specifically, things like time-boxed development and creating moduler tasks which can be designed, coded, tested and feedback produced in a short period of time. Hopefully this means that we will see more frequent development diaries from both myself and Carl on these smaller time-boxed tasks which will help us evaluate what we have produced and how.

Later this week I will be talking about how we simplified our server communications with asynchronous HTTP requests and PHP backend.