Tonight I spent some more time cleaning up my code and then I spent a little more time messing up the code by adding in some artificial intelligence. The Jellyfish on the Feeding Frenzy level (the Pac-Man clone) just weren't difficult enough so I made them chase Bob a bit more "intelligently". They are also very adept now at avoiding him when they are scared. The A.I. could still use some improvements, but it's a much more challenging level then it was when I started tonight.
I really want to take some time after I get my project handed in and see how other people have programmed Pac-Man clones because I say "A.I", but I'm not sure that my method of giving my jellyfish A.I really indicated any level of intelligence. A brute force intelligence maybe, but not real intelligence. So that's definitely an area I'll be investigating further once I have the time.
With the code cleanup, I'm really trying to reign that in at this point and not do too much. There is more refactoring that I could do and there are definitely places where I got a bit sloppy and stopped following my own standards. Then there are other places where I changed the way I decided to do something, but I didn't make the same change throughout the project. However, I don't want to start down this path of cleaning those things up only to find I majorly messed something up in the process so at this point I'm trying to keep my code stable and just add some commenting.
This is always my least favorite time on any project. You can't really do anything you really want to do because you'd have to send it through testing cycles again, but every time you look at the code until the day you release, you see a bunch of things you really should be doing. I'm REALLY looking forward to Friday. In fact, if I can make it through my levels successfully tomorrow after another day of refactoring (limited) and cleanup then I think I'm just going to go ahead and submit it.
When I was commenting my code tonight, I played around a little with the XML commenting feature (in VB putting 3 ' in a row) but I'm not sure that I like the way it looks. It makes my code feel a little more cluttered I think. Maybe it's just to new to me so I'll have to get used to it, but that was my initial impression.
On a non-gaming related note, I just want to give my thanks to Al Gore for inventing the internet. I mentioned the other day that my son had a Star Wars birthday party. Well for that party he got a Lego Star Wars V-Wing fighter which I told him I would help him build later that week. Well, by the time I got around to helping him, he'd lost the instructions already. Luckily, Al Gore was there for me and I was able to use teh internets to find those exact building instructions for that Lego set and could download them in PDF form to my computer for future reference (just in case Google stops backing up teh internets every night). That is just awesome. My son was happy, I was happy and teh internets are teh roxxorz!1!!11