I have an intense craving for mini golf now; thank you for bringing it to mind! Truly amazing that there isn't a spectacular mini golf game for Wii yet.
re best practices and writing tests first: I bought a book on Test Driven Development on a whim and I totally love the idea. It's certainly the best way I've seen to develop discrete modules, cause it forces you to be a user of your own system. I wish I could apply the test-first approach to all my day-to-day stuff but there's a certain... culture in game development that makes it difficult. I will persevere... :)
It's not just game development; it's any shop where there's a "We have no time for luxuries like testing! Rush rush rush to market or we lose!!" mentality, which is sadly a rather pervasive one.
The argument that that PBP made which sold me was: You write dopey little scripts to make sure that your new software works anyway, right? OK, so just learn to do that first, pretending that you've already written the software that the scripts invoke. Add a bit of language/culture-appropiate testing idioms, and there's your initial test suite. As a bonus, you've also designed your initial interface, since you forced yourself to think in terms of how you expect the software to work!
My problem is that most stuff I write can't really be tested without a huge amount of infrastructrue-- even just writing stubs for everything would take more effort than just writing the code, and if anything in the design changes, you have to change a ton of stubs. It's still probably worth it in the long run, but it's a lot of front-loaded pain.
I think I gave away my Mojo to some PS2-newbie friend a long time ago. :)
Anyway (and it almost goes without saying), that's so not the same thing. A Wii minigolf game would by definition rock all over any push-button/click-mouse minigolf game, unless it was programmed by drunken chimps (as 27 percent of all video games are, so).
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re best practices and writing tests first: I bought a book on Test Driven Development on a whim and I totally love the idea. It's certainly the best way I've seen to develop discrete modules, cause it forces you to be a user of your own system. I wish I could apply the test-first approach to all my day-to-day stuff but there's a certain... culture in game development that makes it difficult. I will persevere... :)
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The argument that that PBP made which sold me was: You write dopey little scripts to make sure that your new software works anyway, right? OK, so just learn to do that first, pretending that you've already written the software that the scripts invoke. Add a bit of language/culture-appropiate testing idioms, and there's your initial test suite. As a bonus, you've also designed your initial interface, since you forced yourself to think in terms of how you expect the software to work!
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Anyway (and it almost goes without saying), that's so not the same thing. A Wii minigolf game would by definition rock all over any push-button/click-mouse minigolf game, unless it was programmed by drunken chimps (as 27 percent of all video games are, so).
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