Data Structures - this one will keep you busy

Data structures is nothing to sneeze at, this is first class that has really made me work, and by work I mean 20 hour days, staying up till 3AM creating little console based games that uses really awesome data structures, then studying for a midterm, or quiz, or trying to read up on the next days topic so you don't get left in the dust.

We covered a lot of data structures, these are structures you will not get in a normal data structs class. I think that goes for just about every class here, they are geared toward game development and games are made to be fun but there are tons of very advanced programming techniques and mathematics that come together to create that game.

Sooo the topics we covered

• singly linked lists
• doubly linked lists
• dynamic arrays
• hash tables
• Binary Search trees - (do yourself a favor and learn this one before you get here)
• Insertion sort and Binary Search
• Graphs and finite state machines
• Huffman Compression

Each of these topics was introduced, then in 4 hours we had to build the entire workings on the data structure from scratch, most days we used the entire 4 hours. Some days, like Binary Search Tree day, we couldn't get it completed in lab. And since you a graded on your lab work in this class that's not something you want to do. So read and ahead, and you should be ok.

This was a great class overall, the data structures we learned are the bread and butter of video game development, they are very interesting to learn about, and really cool to program from scratch, definitely challenging, but that's a good thing right?

So we had 3 projects in this class, a data driven menu system, a dictionary Word Scramble game, and a turn based strategy game. All DOS based games, the focus is on the data structures here not the interface (that's next month: Windows Programming 1). I enjoyed them all thoroughly I tried to build in as much polish and pizazz as possible in a short amount of time (short being 3 - 5 days). I ended up getting a 100 on all of these but I had a lot of sleepless nights, I may have gone a tad bit overboard on some things which caused those sleepless nights, but in the end I think it was worth it.