Viva Pinata: A Programer’s Prospective

I think I can finally say I’m a programmer. A young, naive one; but a programmer. I finally completed a working program, the newsletter tracker. I’ll do a post-mortem on that some other time.

When I was doing video production full-time, I found myself not able to watch a movie or commercial without thinking about how the scene was cut, how the actors were lit, or how the camera panned away. When you begin to have just a little knowledge of how something might have been done, you begin to digest its products in a different way; when I play video games or use a program, I have begun to see them for their parts, not just their sum.

That said, I think there is one game that every aspiring developer should play while they are trying to learn prgramming:

Viva Pinata.

The game is PERFECT for the concepts of Object Oriented Programming. The game is, from my perspective, an abstract tutorial in programming concepts.

Almost every introduction to programming book I have read uses the something along these lines of understanding for oop:

You have an object; let’s call it an animal.
You have a dog. A dog is an animal, but an animal might not be a dog.
You have a duck; a duck is an animal, but not a dog.
You have four-legged animals. A fourlegged animal is abstract; it’s an animal, but not all animals are four-legged. Dogs are four-legged. Dogs bark. Bark dog, bark.

And so on. So with Viva Pinata, you have, really only a few basic “objects”:

Animal. Plant. Building. Land. Helper.

You have to treat each one different. But they all interface and interact. And certain animals interact with other animals. So, in my mind, it become so simple to view each animal as a class:

class public Snake()
{
int snakeNumber;
String snakeParent1;
String snakeParent2;

bool Romance1
bool Romance2

public void doRomance1() {
//player did something
Romance1 = true;
}
}

And so on. The game really puts a cute, 3D skin on object oriented prgramming in my mind. It really helped me piece together the “aha!” moments of how a game works. So what’s the point?

For all you XNA developers out there who are far beyond me, I have a request:

a Viva Pinata Starter Kit for XNA

I could only image the fun in creating my own animals to romace, setting what skills they need and so on. If anyone from Microsoft stumbles on to this blog… a Viva Pinata Starter Kit is a new revenue stream for you; I love being in the Creator’s Club and getting free stuff like the XNA Racer (once it comes out). Perhaps you could also offer licensed IP starter kits? Maybe they don’t include the right to create a game off the IP, but I’d pay just to fool around and look at the code of Viva Pinata, or a game like it.

So if you’re reading this, and you’re a programmer, you need to purchase Viva Pinata. Today. It is an incredibly fun game and hasn’t sold nearly was it deserves. Viva Pinata makes Object Oriented Progamming fun for the masses.