Objectify the world (and running into walls, literally)

Here is a video of Ash running into walls:

Note: The lag comes from FRAPS.

This version is different from the last version of my project that was posted. You might be thinking, "duh, you went from a side scroller to a top down adventure game". While that is the obvious change, there is a much more important change hidden away at the back-end; everything is objectified. 

This is a key programming technique that most tutorials I went through to learn stuff ignored for some reason. This caused huge confusion and mess when trying to implement different aspects from different tutorials.

This confusion and mess in fact is why object-orianted programming took off. It's much easier to design, code, and manage.  

It didn't help the confusion and the mess that I didn't know 100% what was happening in those tutorial files. So I just want to take a minute to write about being careful about doing tutorials. Learn the process, don't just do it. If you don't understand the ideas behind the code, even if you understand the code itself (there IS a difference between the two), it will cause you a lot of problems in the near future.

This has happened to me the other day, I wanted to modify something in my file and ran into hours of hair ripping frustration, simply because:

1. It wasn't OO (object oriented)
2. I wasn't really sure what was going on in the code because I didn't understand the tutorials fully as I was doing them

So those are two things that stuck with me through this experience and I took my knowledge from the side scroller project to a new project that is coded better/tidier from the ground up and is in a genre I am much more interested in working with.
Other than learning through pain and transitioning to a new project, I've also been working on:

 Collision

It was a big pain and I'm glad it is out the way. It got out the way hugely thanks to this tutorial. Not only did he nicely explain the concept and the practise behind the collision engine, he also gave a source file that was OO! So, a great help there.

With the code objectified, and collision engine set-up, I can now at least design a screen, which gives me great momentum to carry on this project.

Speaking of design, everything you see is placeholder assets.

To do list
(in the order of where they are swimming around in my head):

• Animation- As you may have noticed, there is no animation. Last engine I used shown in the last post was way too messy and didn't go well with my clean OO project. Not to mention, once again, I hadn't fully grasped it. I will be implementing one that I understand and so even if it isn't neat, I can tidy it up myself.

•  Screen management- Figure out screen management system and implement it. Once implemented, it will give me a main menu, in game menus and ability to switch screens. This one is a biggie and will be another momentous push once figured out.

• Do some paper work design- This is indeed mostly a programming project, but I also want to get some paper work done on the game itself. Design screens on paper, script, some kind of back story, overall story arc, and so on.

• HUD- I am mainly thinking a mini-map but my [so far] little research lead me to believe it might be way out of reach of my current abilities, not to mention the game might not need it. If I'm convinced the game needs it, it will probably be one of the later things I build so I am better experienced by that point and the location layouts have been designed that the mini-map can copy. 

Updates have been slow, because, well, I've been slow on grasping some fundamentals of XNA, and heck, sharpening up on programming concepts in general.

Also I don't get a lot of time to work on this, what with work-work and uni work. But hopefully next update should be a good one (and less word heavy, more screens/videos), as the foundations for the game are slowly but surely building.