The three project solution

Ayende just brought up the issue of project structuring, and his experience was so similar to mine that it cannot be a coincidence.

In my old job I spent a lot of time trying to "do things properly". Splitting up into a lot of logical assemblies, promoting reuse by having special helper assemblies and so on. The result was a huge amount of lugggage that each application had to carry around. When we deployed a simple windows service or console program, it consisted of 9 or 10 assemblies. And don't get me started on versioning all of these, because we were very methodical there too. It sort of worked, but only because we had build a very rigid CI monster controlled by a horde of NAnt scripts that no one - even me who wrote most of them - could figure out after two months away from them.

Today I consider that a learning experience, and I go for the "three project solution". Ayende says two, but I think having a third is worth the hassle. Especially when you create solutions that have different application components in a workflow.

The three projects goes a little something like this:

• Application.Core : Holds all the logic and data for the solution. I split up classes in a logcal folder/namespace structure. As I favor using MVC pattern a lot, it usually holds Model, Controller, DataAccess and Helper folders.
• Application.Core.Test: A test library for the core lib, same structure as the Core.
• Application.<Type>: This is the application itself. The type can be Website, ConsoleApp, Service or whatever it is that I am creating. If there are more apps, there usually is, they get their own projects. All application projects have as shallow code as is can - usually only the View parts of the MVC structure.

I find that it reduces friction both when developing, but especially when deploying. Only two assemblies to deploy. No inter version dependency nightmares and so on. Simple and smooth.

Mass Salvation

Nordic Game Jam is over, and as last year, it was a hoot and a holler! Man, we had fun! I was lucky to get a great team. Four programmers, four game desginers/artists/sound engineers and a great idea. So we managed to get a full a full game up and running on the XBox using XNA in only one and a half day.

The game is called "Mass Salvation" and in accordance with the theme for the Jam, which was Taboo, is about religions. The "back story" is that it is the day before judgement day, actually 1 minute and 30 before, and humanity is a mess. Everybody is atheists and now reckognize their mistake. You take the role as a religious leader and have to convert as many followers to your cause and send them to the sweet afterlife in style.

It is played using a controller geometry wars style by up to four players. You are playing short rounds (1:30), and the pace is frantic. You can pick up and play the game right away, but as you play more, you will learn how to use the rally point to your advantage as well as different strategies for grabbing followers. So the gameplay has several levels of skill.

Below is a video of the mayhem. I will post a link to a downloadable version of the game soon. Just have to repackage it and make a ccgame version as well. So stay tuned!