Helping where I can around the forums

Okay, so I've done a bit of work on the TextBox class, but it really isn't liking me at the moment. Flash shut down on me twice and it won't print my text correctly :(

Oh well. I'll get it to work eventually :D

But today, I did do some other work. While I was searching through the Newgrounds forums, I came across a post with no replies by none other than Bobert-Rob, one of my favourite Newgrounds animators. So, I decided that this would be a great way to start helping people out with code.

Starstruck, I've been trying to do everything I can to give him a perfect system for him to work with, despite not knowing initially what I was doing. While I wrote my cool new system, which involves using arrays to hold selected options from a menu, I learned a bit about arrays that I didn't know before, and also learned how to better use events to minimise the code needed for a project.

I've now posted up a link to the .swf I made using this code, and I am awaiting his reply - looking back on the posts I just realised I've probably annoyed him to no end with my annoying nagging about possible solutions to a problem I should probably have just written a quick answer for - but it's a bit late now; and with any luck, he'll forgive my eagerness due to my inexperience, and will find the more useful and adaptable class a reasonable reward for his patience xD

Boy, have I been busy or what?

Busy, yes; productive, no. I've started to do a bit of work on my TextBox class, creating basically an XML parsing class so I can write scripts in text and print them out from that base form. For now, it reads the text - something that works.

I have devised a brilliant new plan to help launch my bright new coding career - advertising myself as an amateur coder looking for a bit of free work I can do to start building myself a real portfolio. I'm guessing that having past work I can show off will help to no end with getting in on projects I want to work on.

I've also started posting in the forums on Newgrounds, to try and get a bit more notice ... I've written a few posts helping people out with their ActionScript problems, so a few more people will see my name and my links, and hopefully some of them will have a bit of work I can do to get myself off the ground.

Also, seeing as I bet I'm the only one currently reading these posts, it seems like a good idea to get others here, because I don't want to look back on this blog in a year and realise that I wasted many good hours of my life talking to myself :P

So yes, I am getting to work with this whole plan, I'm making it happen ... let's just hope it all works out well.

Okay, so for my first project ...

I bet when you first saw the title, you thought I'd decided on an idea that would eventually become a good game.

Sorry to disappoint you :(

If you didn't think that, congratulations, you're not disappointed! :D

Seriously though, no matter what I do, I either end up settling on a game that would either take MONTHS to get part way through, or a project that I would hate doing and would end up looking terrible.

So I've decided to take another approach to this - I'm going to build classes for my future projects, so that when I finally come up with an idea I'll already have a whole heap of useful tools done.

To start with, I've made a list, and I'm going to go through one by one until I can check each and every one of them off. The first will be :

"A class used to build a TextBox, including a border, a background, text, and scrolling."

Doesn't sound like much? It actually does involve a fair bit of code. It would be smaller if I was going to build this specifically for a project, but I'm not, so it'll be bigger and more versatile.

Now, I guess, I should probably just get started on this :D

Hello there, visitor!

Hello, and welcome to my blog!

My purpose here is very simple; I'm an aspiring coder, and I wanted a blog both to advertise what I was doing, to have a base site for all of my work, and to provide both myself and others with some kind of loose idea of what I'm doing with my projects at any time.

My mind tends to start wandering when I start working on something, leading to more ideas about other projects that I then decide I want to start working on. It's a vicious cycle.

But no more! I have decided that I am keeping a record of what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. This, in theory, should keep me on task and focused on what needs to be done. Especially if, one day in the future, someone takes the time to read these because they want me to work on another project :D

Of course, ironically, by making this blog I'm putting off what I should be doing with my projects ... so ... I'll stop writing this now. Welcome to my blog, and enjoy your stay!