Pre-alpha

A bit of an issue came up so I am a bit late starting this section. Started at 10:00 and finished at 10:45

The fist thing that has to be done is to clone the files for poker dice. I am using poker dice as a skeleton for this game because the game is very similar to that game in the fact that I am going to allow for up to 6 players to play the game. This is a simple file copy operation with some re-naming. The title screen isn't going to be created until much later so just a placeholder has to be made.

Refactoring the code is much nicer when you have Eclipse doing the work for you. Unfortunately, I do not have Flex Builder and from what I understand (thought I could be wrong) you need to have Flex Builder version 3 to enable refactoring. I am using jEdit which does not have built in refactoring capabilities. For those of you who are not sure what refactoring is, it is simply the process of renaming classes and functions so that they fit better within the structure of the program. In the case of starting a new project from the code of an old project, you have to not only change the package name but the names of the classes and then find all references to the old name and replace it with the new name. Then you have to get everything to compile at which point you find out that you missed something and have to edit it again.

For the record, there are 3 classes that go into the game. There is the actual game playing movieclip, called DropDeadGame which will handle the game play once I get to that portion of the development. Next, you have the DropDeadPlayer which holds the player score and other relevant player information. Finally, you have the DropDead class which is the manager and can be thought of by Lord of the Rings fans as the "One class to rule them all and in the virtual machine bind them!"

I was going to do a bit more of stripping of redundent code, but figure that instead I will do that when I get around to it. So, for our pre-alpha we end up with a poker dice game with a new title. Internally, there is more that has changed, but you as a player can't see that.