Finals are now long gone and I'm quite happy! Sadly to say, although I've had plenty of free time, I have not been working on my project at all. Now that classes are over I've taken advantage of the short vacation I have to just relax and spend time playing games and get out of the homework groove. I'm not intending to stay this way forever, though. Updates will come soon enough. As I've stated in earlier posts, things have been coming along nicely. I have no complaints about the progress that's been going on because the results of my hard work are really showing off. There's still a lot to add but I'm confident it will turn out great.

A few more neccessary sprites were added to the game. These were minimal and probably took me around ten minutes to whip up. I just needed something there as a placeholder! I've also added a nice background to the screen that I do all of my visual testing. I must say it looks a lot nicer than a plain black background.

I pushed things a little further by adding sounds for almost every aspect of the game I've got currently working. Granted, that's not a lot; but when the sounds are added in there's a big change. Getting all of this visual and audial feedback is a great thing. It's starting to pull together what little of a game I have.

There are many things that need to be fixed up now. Currently there's a lot of mangled and messy testing code that needs to be optimized and documented. Things are kind of floating around everywhere, which makes it very hard to find what I want to work on. Even though everything works when I run the game, being able to read my own code efficiently is quite important. I hope to clean up all of the mess before I start coding in some of the new stuff.

So, I essentially lied when I said I was not going to do any more work spriting things. I created six new aminations for six of the sprites I have. Don't go getting any big ideas about this. These are animations for very simple objects in the game, so they didn't take a back-breaking amount of time to complete. I just had to add them in or else those objects didn't feel complete at all.

While adding them in I came to a sort of roadblock with some dangling pointers here and there which made me reassess my plans. I first assumed I should have added some kind of extra unnecessary error checking to my ls_sprite class, but ultimately I found out that doing so was rather pointless and actually redundant upon something that the constructor of the class already enforces. I later realized that one of my major mistakes was simply not setting a pointer to null upon instancing a class. Such a classic error, and I can't believe it has evaded me for the time it has.

Upcoming finals are going to slow things down to a semi-crawl as I will need to, obviously, study for them. Once they are finished, however, it's free time galore!