SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

nt

Testing / Debugging often takes longer than coding, but so does designing graphics, audio and sometimes the GUI interface depending on the library and language.

Play-testing or break-testing can also be time consuming if you don't have some way to automate it (or a little brother keen to play that new game).

If you find yourself compiling your whole app/game after each change to check it works; consider writing a unit test for that function and checking it does what it should in isolation. It can often save you hours of debugging time later too.

my advices :
-make separate examples of procedures / systems / graphics effects that you can reuse.
-code your logic with words (english) before coding with the programming language.
-sometimes it is better to write a code a little more lengthy, to split a procedure in steps, in order to debug it more easily (a more lengthy code does not necessarily means worse perfomance...)

with time you will better understand how to code the logic, and not need to compile / test as much.

Testing takes a longtime 

Currently single stepping through z80 emulated code in Blitzmax. Sometimes you don't see an error occur untill a few hundred executes in!
sometimes you tweak an instruction and all looks good! you load another game that was working and now it dosent 

Im writting a Zx Spectrum emulator "SpecBlitz" and i spend more time single stepping it checking that bits, Bytes and Flags get altered as i go single stepping

I need to get a life really but there's nothing todo at the Mo!

Good job my wife's a Book worm as i spend hour's coding.

Kind Regards Baggey

At work we apply the 80-20 rule. My boss doesn't mind 80% of development time is spent in the last 20% of development.

Quote from: col on April 04, 2021, 13:51:02
At work we apply the 80-20 rule. My boss doesn't mind 80% of development time is spent in the last 20% of development.

boss-pareto-optimum


bye
Ron