Following a brief read of a C++ book in the library, my understanding of C++ has increased and the complexity of my game has decreased. I now understand what a pure virtual function is, and why a copy constructor can be a useful thing.

I also realised I was creating redundant images and after removing them my game runs quicker – not that you notice much on a non-action game, but the improvement is there all the same

Shoving things out the way in classes makes life so much easier. Rather than calculating a load of screen offsets and testing if the user is actually clicking on the game board, I simply tell the gameboard the user has clicked the mouse and it does it all for me. Writing the level editor will now be very simple, all I have to do is change the ID of the tile being used and since tiles are now represented by integers, that’ll be exceedingly simple

Even writing out the XML file containing the new level data will be easy.

This sudden increase in simplicity (decrease in complexity? Can you increase the simplicity of something, or is that like trying to prevent the cold from escaping out your fridge rather than preventing the heat getting in) is good since I’m getting a bit bored now and want to play with OpenGL.