Has Hooptie helped you?

[Kjurtyl]

I am conducting this poll in order to evaluate the success of Hooptie as a tool to help educate the newcomer to Cocoa game programming. For anyone who has gained some Cocoa knowledge from reading the source or from contributing to the source (please post any other methods Hooptie has helped you in), I'd like to know if the current commenting format and means of execution (e.g. CVS) has enhanced or hindered the process. Please note that artists can vote as well, as their contributions may have helped them further themselves in their respective field without being related to programming. I would appreciate if it was clarified to which category the voter belongs to in a reply.

The context is that with January (i.e. free time again) right around the corner, I will be in the process of finalizing a tutorial along the lines of the "game in 60 minutes" of TNT Basic fame, (I acknowledge others did it much earlier,) with the focus on how to quickly get started from scratch.

My thought being that perhaps this is a better approach overall for the Inkubator model; have many people contribute on a quick tutorial with their respective expertise rather than have a group contributing on a source not everyone may "feel" enough for it to keep contributing.

The tutorials could be in quick succesion with limited goals (establish a high score system, reading and interpreting levels from a file) rather than an ambitious mega-project that encompasses all. Furthermore as we would move from one tutorial to the next, the "game" per se need not be the same - not every game out there needs networking capabilities.

Please vote on this poll and post any further comments relating to my thoughts above or the future of Inkubator/Hooptie in this thread. The poll is simple to have a rough gauge which will be refined by any comments you post along with your vote.

- Kjurtyl

[Josh]

The Hooptie source was very helpful to me when I first started. It demonstrated not only how to make a game using Objective-C/Cocoa but also OO programming. It also shows how to do sound, music, collision detection, level loading, drawing, preferences, etc.

Doing something like this with OpenGL would be very cool, IMHO.

[Bachus]

The Hooptie source didn't really teach me anything specific to game development (collision detection, AI, etc), but it did help me learn how some things are done in Cocoa. System specific stuff like the sound code/high scores/preferences etc were a great help since I had already done things like that under Classic, but now needed to know how they were done in OS X.

[DaFalcon]

Hooptie helped me gain confidence and some experience creating animated graphics... so I voted that it helped me a lot, though it didn't help teach me to program in Cocoa :-)

[Iceman]

Hooptie helped me understand how to create a tile based game. The only thing I would like to see is better Cocoa structure. Especially since my Cocoa game structure isn't that good.

Thanks,
Iceman

[igame3d]

Originally posted by Kjurtyl
. My thought being that perhaps this is a better approach overall for the Inkubator model; have many people contribute on a quick tutorial with their respective expertise rather than have a group contributing on a source not everyone may "feel" enough for it to keep contributing.

The tutorials could be in quick succesion with limited goals (establish a high score system, reading and interpreting levels from a file) rather than an ambitious mega-project that encompasses all. Furthermore as we would move from one tutorial to the next, the "game" per se need not be the same - not every game out there needs networking capabilities.
- Kjurtyl

Sounds like what Inkubator should have been.
The whole look in the source code and learn approach is just evil. Definately a step by step approach that varies the end product from time to time would be more interesting.
I played Hooptie at least once at each release, and although its a nice Pengo clone, it didn't excite me to go open the source code.

[geezusfreeek]

Originally posted by Kjurtyl
My thought being that perhaps this is a better approach overall for the Inkubator model; have many people contribute on a quick tutorial with their respective expertise rather than have a group contributing on a source not everyone may "feel" enough for it to keep contributing.

The tutorials could be in quick succesion with limited goals (establish a high score system, reading and interpreting levels from a file) rather than an ambitious mega-project that encompasses all. Furthermore as we would move from one tutorial to the next, the "game" per se need not be the same - not every game out there needs networking capabilities.

I think that Inkubator should be a big open source project. It would be cool, though, if the developers working on the game would make tutorials explaining how they went about making the additions they made to the project and what the thought process was like.