University of the West of England, Bristol

Bristol Institute of Technology

UFCET3-20-2 Coding for Games Development

Semester One Assignment - Wolf Pack Game

Feedback Notes

Feedback for the Various Sprite Classes

These general comments apply to all the sprite classes you modified, such as SubmarineSprite, TorpedoSprite, etc

Feedback on Your Coding:

If your code reached professional standard (i.e. better than we'd expect from a student) then you could get 8/10, 9/10 or 10/10 - although you'd only get the highest marks if your code is excellent in all areas, including comments and consts!
If your code reached the best standard we'd expect from a student then you would get 7/10
This would be reduced if you made any errors with each new type of error reducing the mark by 1
The minimum mark for correctly working code was 4/10

Most common reasons for losing marks:

• Using inverted tests in successive if statements instead of if ... else
• Writing if (boolFlag == true) instead of   if (boolFlag)
• Writing if (boolFlag == false) instead of   if (!boolFlag)
• Not checking the Show flag to see if an animation has finished

Normally, whatever error you made would be flagged up on your individual feedback sheet.

Feedback on Your Comments

Marks were normally given based on the number comments you put in the code, provided the comments actually made sense. In general, the more comments you put in, the higher the mark.

A number of you put in comments, but they were faulty in some way. These were generally pointed out but mostly did not get any penalty. However, you should take note of them and make sure you avoid them in later work.

Typical problems in comments (not normally penalised this time):

• Restating the code in the comment. This was a fairly common issue. For example
  // Test the show flag
if (!Show) { ...
  
  As you can see this doesn't really enlighten the reader. This particular comment would be better stated as:
  // Test if the animation sequence has finished
if (!Show) { ...
  
  
• Putting comments beside the code. This is a very very common mistake and many of you made this error:
  if (!Show) {             // Test if the animation has finished
  
  It's not obvious why this is wrong, so here's the reason why: As a code statement gets longer so the amount of space available to write the comment gets smaller, and it becomes difficult to keep the comments nicely aligned. It's very problematic if you have to print out the code on A4 paper which is usually 80 columns wide.
   
  However, if you put the comments before the statements (indented to line up with the statement) all these problems go away.

Important note: You don't need to put a comment for every statement in your code. Instead, it is usually more effective to break code down into "paragraphs" and then put a single comment to describe the paragraph. For example:

case SAILING:
    // Has the ship been hit by a torpedo?
    if (_hitByTorpedo)
    {
        // Start the explosion animation and change state
        SetCycle(-1, 10, 10);
        FrameNumber = 1;
        _state = SINKING;
    }
   
    // User holding down left and right?
    else if (kbState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Left) && kbState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Right)
    {
        // Can't go anywhere so do nothing!
    }
    :  :  : 

Feedback on your Choice of Names in Sprite Classes

I am pleased to say that most of you followed the naming conventions and scored full marks in this section.

Feedback on your Use of Consts in Sprite Classes

You should use a const for every number you write in your code (with the possible exception of 0 or 1) and you earned full marks if you did this.
Marks were reduced if you put numbers in your code without making them consts.
If you didn't create any consts at all then you got zero for this section.

Remember: Each time you write 50, or 100 or whatever in your code you should make it a const!

The Game1 Class

Coding

If you managed to get the game working by uncommenting the supplied boilerplate (nearly everybody) then you scored 8 marks.

A small number of students made some really clever modifications to the code which improved it and they scored 10 marks.

Comments

See your individual feedback

Names and Consts

Nearly everybody got full marks in this section.