A lot has happened in the past weeks and I still can’t believe it. But first things first:
For the second time I’m taking part in Germany’s federal computer science contest (for students): It’s called “Bundeswettbewerb Informatik” and consists of 5 problems (respectively 6 for teens aged under 16) which have to be solved in about two months’ time. I wrote and tested everything in about 4 days (2 days in my fall vacation and 2 days right before the submission date). The code isn’t beautiful:
- it’s meant to be short, so it won’t waste too many pages when printed out;
- it’s meant to be simply and make use of libraries, so the documentation can be kept short and to the point (no need to explain sorting when STL already does it);
- it was hacked together in only 4 days in semi-crunch mode.
The documentation isn’t very good either, for the aforementioned reasons and I wrote all ~14 pages in 2 days, so there wasn’t much time to correct and proofread, but anyway you can download my submission here.
(BTW if you happen to be a corrector for BWINF and specifically happen to be mine, please note that I always exaggerate and am pessimistic, and my submission is pretty good after and I’ve taken it very seriously *nervous laughter*)
If it wasn’t for my job application at Splash Damage, of which I unexpectedly heard back four days before the final submission date of the contest, I would quite possibly not have taken the time to finish 4 problems in total, write some lousy documentation for them and send them off, but the motivation boost that the reply from SD gave me (or rather the prospect of it) was simply incredible. Now the answer to my application is a whole different story and I’ll tell it some other time.
In other news, Shelled! has finally been released Tuesday night and I’ve been playing it like mad online and people seem to enjoy it, too. I guess we can call it an success, even though there are still some minor bugs in the release build. But Joshua, the owner, founder - and the honorable master of Red Thumb Games found a job/internship at GarageGames and has been busy since, so he decided to release the current version of Shelled! for free instead of waiting another month or two until some kind of copy protection had been built in by us.
Download it from http://www.shelledgame.com and give it a try!
I’ll try to write a post-mortem soon and add it to my project page, but right now I’m busy with some contract work I got from GarageGames (thanks Joshua!) and I have already spent enough valuable time writing up this post :)
So stay tuned and watch out for the fish,
Andreas