AI-Powered Code Review and The Fox Actor

I thought it would be useful to get a quick code review to catch any trivial mistakes, as I’m new to C programming.

I found this simple web app that reviews your code. It takes a GitHub repo address and an OpenAI API key, then uses ChatGPT for the review. However, I was hesitant to share my OpenAI API key. As a workaround, I could have created a new API key for the review and deleted it afterward, but another issue was that I hadn’t pushed the code to GitHub.

Instead, I ended up pasting individual files directly into ChatGPT and received some feedback, mainly confirming that I wasn’t making any trivial mistakes.

Vania Volpe

The main character of this game is a fox named Vania.

Note: the animation above shows the initial name Veronica Volpe. I changed it to Vania because it should be easier for younger kids to pronounce.

The Fox Actor

I extracted some repeated functions to load media and render the fox actor into a new fox.h/fox.c library. The library also declares the Fox type, which contains some metadata about the fox actor.

Object-Oriented Programming with ANSI-C

Most functions in the fox library require a Fox* pointer as input, so I wanted to know if there is a way to define instance methods on structs.

I found this useful resource: Object-Oriented Programming with ANSI-C. However, I didn’t find an easy way to pass a reference to self to struct methods. I guess it might be easier to rewrite the project in C++.

To keep things simple, I ensured that all functions requiring a Fox* pointer accept it as their first parameter by convention.

Fox Movement

The fox moves at a constant speed from current_position to target_position.

Horizontal and vertical speed components are calculated when fox_walk_to is invoked and stored in the SDL_Point direction field in the struct. At each fox_update function invocation, x and y speed increments are added to the fox’s current position.

Fox Orientation

Depending on the delta value on the horizontal axis, I changed the fox’s horizontal orientation to face east or west.

I modified the rendering function invoked in render_animation to copy the texture data to the screen using SDL_RenderCopyEx, which accepts an additional SDL_RendererFlip parameter for flipping the texture. I also added a new SDL_RendererFlip flip field in the AnimationData type.