Then I went looking through my own journal, and got REALLY depressed. I'll try to keep it short, but here's why (or scroll down, there may be pictures) (actually, turns out you don't have to scroll down to see pictures).
I've been trying to pick up my programming stuff again, and have actually been kind of excited about it. I'm still using the SnakeEngine (Scarlet), and I'm still trying to make "lots of little" games rather than doing something big. That way I can actually accomplish something and learn a lot without wasting a lot of time with a bad design. My unstated goal was to make one game for each version of the SnakeEngine, apply lessons learned, and move on. So here's what I've done so far with each version:
[Garter]: Squarediana Jones (for Ravuya's One-Button One-Week Contest)
[Ringneck]: Aliens What Which Fall From the Heavens and Drop Bombs or Missiles or Something
[Scarlet]: ...?
The Space Invaders game was 2006. Clearly things are going exactly as I had planned!
Now, I've done some stuff with Scarlet, like that dinosaur thing, but that's not really a game (even if you can walk around and shoot missiles), although it is based on and idea I had I hope to make someday.
More recently I've had another distraction from making actual games: a memory manager. I haven't really spent a lot of time on it, but I do have something that works as a bare minimum, and it was kind of a fun project. Also, I'm using it in my current game project: Missile Command!
I'm not losing, I just don't have anything to defend yet.
The actual title will probably be "Three Bases What Which Shoot Missiles at Other Missiles to Protect Six Cities From Them". Or something like that.
At any rate, the game shouldn't take much longer to finish, and will hopefully be more fun than my space invaders game, where the scores were more related to your tolerance for the tedious rather than your skill.
But! What comes after that is (even) more interesting! A complete rethinking of everything up to this point! I know that sounds crazy, but if we look back to the beginning of the SnakeEngine (ALLLL the way back to 2005) I wrote:
Quote:Original Post by Me
...SnakeEngine would probably be better named as "The Snake Experiments", meaning I'm not caring too much about backwards compatibility between versions...
It was all supposed to be basically throw-away code between each version. I go on to say:
Quote:Original Post by Me
[The Samus sprite engine] uses Garter (I'll probably try to de-couple those two, so I can use it without changing it with future engines, which should be trivial)
To show how far away from my original plan was, the Samus sprite engine is now part of SnakeEngine!!
So anyway, I'm going to do some serious re-evaluating of my process, tools, environment, pretty much everything. And this isn't to say I'm going to scrap all the code I've written in the last 900 years, because it's not all bad. In fact, most of it will probably live on for a while in some form or another.
I cast:
on myself.
In the end, however, I'm not actually depressed. Something has re-sparked my interest and I want to make games again. I've been thinking a lot about them, in fact, and I have over 5000 game ideas in my head right now.
Finally, I realize many of my posts here are about how I'm going to do stuff, but what can I say, it helps to write out my thoughts, might as well let people read them :P. Thanks!
