Planet SoC

You may have been wondering where I disappeared to the last two days. The combination of a slow Monday and family visiting on Tuesday made for little to write about, and consequently I forgot to write, about anything! Rest assured I have been working. The start of my week has been occupied largely by reading, and I can gladly announce that I finished reading (for the first time :P) Effective C++ by Scott Meyers.
As Tyler told me when he recommended the book, “it will transform a novice/intermediate C++ programmer into an advanced one,” something I can now retrospectively agree with. While a single read through hasn’t necessarily transformed me into a C++ guru, it has certainly made it very clear to me HOW I will program when I reach C++ nirvana. I learned a lot from the book and I am sure when I consistently and constantly apply all that knowledge I will truly be, a C++ master :P.
Another semi-milestone of my week is that I believe I am nearing the completion of my personal “alpha” testing (if thats the correct word for it.) At present I am more and more feeling like I have depleted my store of “nastiness” to throw at my ruleset to try and break it/bend the rules. Since private testing is a very…private matter, I’ll try and outline the what and how of my testing:

• Initial Testing: Treat the game “normally” and ensure that Orders/game works in the simplest flavor. This stage more or less ensured that the game “worked” in its most basic playable form. This testing occurred mostly during development, in my case (even though I did play a simple game or two upon completing the “basic” game).
• Full game testing: This stage of testing saw me playing a few complete games of Risk, both in “random planet assignment” mode and “bidding mode”. I didn’t strive to push the orders particularly hard; I merely played some games to completion.
• Abusive testing: This stage of testing saw me “beating the crap” out of orders using the white-box approach; I knew how my orders worked, particularly their weak/less-thought-out points, and I utilized those to either abuse or break the game. This stage helped me to eliminate a few potential “cheating” locations, where users could create new units, etc. Particular attention was payed to the Colonize and Move orders, as they represented the most complex and fragile orders.

At present I believe I have rounded out the frailty of my complex orders, and am confident that all orders work correctly when used in (almost) any combination. From guessing, and an email to my mentor, Tyler, the next logic step appears to be peer/player-testing. I’m now tasked with having other people play my game in an attempt to locate further inadequacies/deficiencies. The most obvious candidate for this is Tyler, but seeing as he is under a fairly heavy load at the moment testing with him may have to wait. There is the possibly infinitely more discriminate candidate known as “a wife.” I believe my “wife” will be able to really do some damage to my game, both aesthetically and mechanically; I will enlist her aid this week to let loose on my ruleset. As for my time between peer testing, I plan on furthering my C++ knowledge further, and going over old code to clean things up. I may begin THINKING about XML parsing for map imports, but I am going to go out on a whim and restrict myself from coding that until after midterms (which is quite soon anyways.)