Sunday, January 31, 2010

Back to game devving

Yes! I am back! I haven't been away for long, 3 days is not much but if you consider the entire week before announcing the break in which I wrote less than 100 lines of code then I have rested considerably.

Taking time off and looking at things from another point of view (the point of view of a person that's not doing anything constructive or work related except for a small job-thing) I finally found a way to do what I like doing (making games) without losing sight of what I want to do (make games). This might sound obvious for many but it wasn't for me. You see, every time I wanted to make a game I started making an engine practically from scratch, an engine I wanted to be reusable robust etc. I was dumber than the dumbest guy in Dumbville, the capital of Dumbland. Every single little thing had to be implemented by me (on top of wanting too much things I didn't really need) which led me through many failed attempts of reinventing the wheel and making unfinished libs I didn't really need. Whenever I asked myself "Is it worth it to do everything by yourself?" I always answered promptly "Yes! I can learn tons from it!", and even though I indeed learned many things ultimately it kept me behind. If I had first made the games and only while making them I tried to implement the missing functions not only I would learn more but I would have actually made something worth showing to people!

So what I've come to create a few commandments for myself:
-Thou shall not program what is not needed.
-Thou shall try to use freely available libraries for thy needs before writing your own.
-Thou shall not reinvent the wheel if it's irrelevant to thy progress!

I think that's all of them.
Another good thing that came from the pause in programming my engine is that now I want to work on it so I can finally start making a game I planned! This is mostly because I realized how tedious it is to write GUI applications without a purpose! Passing those few tutorials made me really want to make something useful again, so I already finished my collision detection engine (I call it finished but I'll be adding more functionality later) and now I'll just write the display layers and the game manager code and this will be it for this engine iteration(I already lost the count).

1 comment:

  1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I5NrJr6tic

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