Overcomplicating the Simple Things I

I was going to continue writing some of the code from an earlier project the other day, but I realized I couldn't find that project anywhere on my computer. I do still have the DirectX and C++ project sitting on my desktop, but given how long it takes for me to accomplish anything in that project, I will continue to have it on hold for the foreseeable future. As I may or may not have stated in one of my previous posts (which I would be lying to say 'recent' when my latest post was the middle of last year), I wanted to focus my side-project endeavors on XNA for the sake of speed.

What I have now is 2 projects -- a 360 project and a Windows project. Both are currently identical, with the exception that one is debugged directly on my 360 and the other is debugged on my PC. After a quick search, I couldn't see any settings to determine if this could be done with a single project, but I'm supposing some minor differences between the two will be coming up soon in terms of a settings menu and whatnot, so no matter. I didn't see this as a big enough hurdle to warrant a search on the interwebs for an alternative.

The project I had been attempting to find was the result from my previous blog post, with implementing a GameState interface to handle my different game states. It was just a proof of concept project that I had completed, albeit with somewhat boring results of just changing the background color. Details, details... So this was what I had spent yesterday recreating to catch up to speed.

What I'm realizing now, after spending a morning fine-tuning just the Main Menu logic, is my tendency to expand, and perhaps complicate, what is very simple.

My Main Menu is currently split into 5 different files. This is really for cleanliness purposes, as the code does look highly readable. The MainMenu.cs file is also the largest of those files, sitting at 114 lines, with the others each at 13-24 lines.

I have the logic here revolving around the menu items, where each menu item is its own class inheriting from iMenuOption (though continuing to call them 'items' makes me want to change all of this 'MenuOption' talk to 'MenuItem'). MainMenu just keeps track of which menu item is selected, handles moving up and down the menu, and calls a Select function for the selected option when the player hits A. I also have some placeholder logic to account for sub-menus, though I don't have any of those actually created yet, and pressing B to go back a menu.

Maybe I'm a bit self-conscious of putting 'too much' effort into such a small part of this project, but in a way I find such 'tedious' tasks to be enjoyable. After I complete the sub-menu logic, maybe I'll actually get around to programming the actual game, though it is up for question of how complicated I'll be making that process.

I hope to be a bit more active on this blog now, as I actually strive to do side project work instead of just think about it. Hopefully more to come soon, though no promises shall be made.