Many years ago, I spent a little bit of time trying to apply my undergrad coursework to making a game for my TI-89 calculator. There was a simple IDE somebody had made and I was able to test in an emulator and then on real hardware.
I got so far as having some sprites moving around the screen and shooting and had to put it all to rest before I got around to implementing collision detection but I learned an incredible amount from it.
The most interesting thing is that the solutions I came up with (and thought were very clever) I found out later were often the "way" things were actually done in the commercial world. Like screen buffering, how to define a sprite as data, sprite composition, the game loop, etc. I probably had to tackle and figure out a couple dozen challenges and most of them turned out to be reasonable solutions to the problem.
The hardware target being very simple also forced me to think about optimization and compute cost in ways I hadn't thought of before.
I wish it had been a formal course in Uni. Everbody had a TI calculator of some sort anyways, and a semester of building a simple game would have been tremendously educational.
I got so far as having some sprites moving around the screen and shooting and had to put it all to rest before I got around to implementing collision detection but I learned an incredible amount from it.
The most interesting thing is that the solutions I came up with (and thought were very clever) I found out later were often the "way" things were actually done in the commercial world. Like screen buffering, how to define a sprite as data, sprite composition, the game loop, etc. I probably had to tackle and figure out a couple dozen challenges and most of them turned out to be reasonable solutions to the problem.
The hardware target being very simple also forced me to think about optimization and compute cost in ways I hadn't thought of before.
I wish it had been a formal course in Uni. Everbody had a TI calculator of some sort anyways, and a semester of building a simple game would have been tremendously educational.