Week 3

We realized this week that our timeline was slightly backwards -- although we were supposed to be working on the last of our background research, we didn't know what sorts of tools we needed to create our game because we didn't know anything about our game.

On Tuesday we took a small segue to start talking about what order we would present information to players (Week 4). We came up with the following list:

1. Physical Memory and Addresses
2. Types of Pointers/Variables
1. Void Pointers
2. Casting
3. Pointers to Pointers
   
3. Initializing Pointers (pointing them to NULL) and *
   
4. Pointer Assignment (pointing at a variable)
5. Dereferencing Pointers (getting values out of them) and &
6. NULL pointers versus uninitialized pointers
7. Segmentation faults
8. Uses for Points (Arrays, Linked Lists) and malloc and alloc
1. Pointer Arithmetic
   
9. Freeing Pointers
10. Void Pointers and Casting
11. Pointers to Pointers
12. Pointer Arithmetic

The indented points are places that we believe referencing that information will be important, for example, noting that void pointers exist when we discuss pointer types, but not actually going into them until #10. We are also not sure we want to talk about pointer arithmetic, but if we do, it would be the last topic.
We consider topics 10 through 12 to be the "advanced" topics, with everything before then being necessary to a basic understanding of pointers.

Once we had this information, we were able to decide that RPG Maker was the appropriate program to use. We acquired a version, and also downloaded the scripting language Ruby which RPG Maker uses for more complex events. We both completed the online tutorial "Ruby in Twenty Minutes".

Elyse has been working on preparing our proposal presentation for next Tuesday. Donna has been working with RPG Maker. With Elyse's input, she has created a small game where the player tries to fix fragmented memory and learns a little about physical memory in the process. We will be using this game as a prototype for the sorts of more complex events we can have occur.