Call Me Edward Hicks

Yeah, I guess no one really wants to admit they're naive (though maybe it has it's qualities). Naivety in retrospect can make you feel regretful of your decisions or your lack of fore sight. I have to admit that my belief that I would make quick and decisive thrusts into the foray of 2D game design were naive at best, now that I am knee deep in it and looking back. Ya know... Perhaps game design isn't quite as simple and manageable as I thought it was. Yep, I can hear all the experienced developers laughing hysterically as they read this... but I guess that realization has to sink in to everybody sooner or later.

My development is going a lot slower than I planned. Painfully slow, actually. Though I have managed to surpass my milestone. That one brick wall that I kept coming up to time and time and time again that just frustrated me to no end turned out to be transformational matrices. Hoo boy! I've come to learn that it's one of those integral parts to almost every game out there that I was blissfully ignorant of all this time. It surprises me to think of all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes of the most simple of games that most people would find overwhelmingly complex. Well, like I said, I was naive to the complexity, but I've been put in my place. I've been doing a lot of learning, and I intend to come out on top.

Well my Confined/Mastery project turned out to be too broad a canvas to learn about the little nuances of the game engine I'm making, such as matrix transformation, so I ended up taking a step back and trying to work with a more manageable platform. This started out borrowing my camera and scene code from the game and making a small test bed. It has quickly evolved into a Map Editor-to-be.

My current project is MapTastic, my tile-based map editor-in-progress, that has allowed me to over come my transformation hurdles and remain productive for my final goal. I'm slowly coming to realize all the research and learning and understanding I'm having to accomplish, or will in the near future. The matrix math, events and delegate function logic, game state engineering, file management, XML cataloging, in-game events and scripting, shaders and all that fancy stuff... the list goes on and on. I truly do have my work cut out for me. There's not a ton of material to read out there, but thankfully there's enough that with a -little- bit of time and mind-numbing trial and error I might actually possibly hopefully be able to pull it all together in time... I cannot fathom how this stuff gets done with deadlines.

And if I might before I go... it blows my mind that people are able to generate fairly complex games in the matter of a day, or a few days, or a week, or whatever those crazy competitions are. I dunno if they're basement dwelling keyboard-dependent freaks of nature that just live and breathe code, or if they're just that freakin' good, but man... I'm jealous. :P Wish I could be a freak of nature. :P

The Milestone

Ahh you thought you'd seen the last of me... You can't get rid of me that easily!? Bwahahaha!! Yeah ehh, it's been a looooong few months since April (ouch!) with little to show for it. I apologize. First, my video card pooped and it's replacements were not DirectX 9 compatible, meaning... No XNA for May and June. Then, I hunkered down and bought a nice little house out in the corn fields... woo!! So, no XNA in July either. Suddenly, August has rolled ohh so slowly around, my computer is cooperating, and I've settled in to my home, and now... I trudge on. My blather may not be so exceptional as a result of all that, but still, at least I will have stuff to communicate. :)

The Milestone!! Oooooooh! To me, the milestone of my gaming designing endeavors is the point I get to every time I try to develop something, where I surpass my previous efforts. Over the years that milestone has stepped up ever so slightly... maybe at this rate I'll have a full game by 2150... you know when ehh... I'm almost 200... yeah... No! I need to break the trend I've set myself to of peetering out and starting anew. It's good that I do actually exceed myself each time, but it's not good that I don't really leave myself in the dust, you know?

Not anymore! My milestone has arrived. I've been somewhat busy with Confined since I moved and got my computer working, and it's gotten me to that milestone. My last game creation attempt ended at the point where I got the player drawn, the cursor moving, the input flowing, and the camera working how I liked it (I'm a real sucker for smooth scrolling/zooming)... then it was on to physics and... that was it. It did me in... I lost interest. Blasphemous, I know. Gah! It's kind of frustrating looking back at it... but it was a learning experience. Here I am once again at that very same crossroads... I've got a better platform to work with, I've got renewed vigor and passion for accomplishment, I've got the tools and more know-how, I've managed to corrupt friends into joining the Game Design Cause (sorry Matt) which has in turn regaled me, and I'm going to grab that milestone and run with it! WHO'S WITH ME??!!!

...Ehh sorry, I can be excitable when it comes to this stuff. :) So yeah, I'm set and focused... or something like that. I'm to the point where I was last time. I'm going to best that and I'm not going to stop any time soon. I'm going to forget about the excrutiating physics that seems to best me every time I try this temporarily. My current task is overhauling my SceneNode class to use a Body of one or more BodyParts instead of just a single AnimatedSprite. This will allow me to layer sprites better, make people with separate head, torso, arms, legs, yet whole bodies, and do who knows what to them. Since I see your mind is straying the gutter now (you should be ashamed!) I'm going to stop. Seeya next time!