I'm attending GDC (Game Developers Conference) this week in San Francisco, mostly to learn what others in the games industry have to teach about getting a game studio up and running. I've also been picking up various gems of wisdom from between the lines of many of the talks I've been to so far. This is the first time that I've attended myself. (i've wanted to for so long but could never seem to justify the not-insignificant expense before..)
Work on the current project had stalled for a bit, because I bit off a little more than I could chew and broke a lot of stuff. Many hours of fixing compiler errors and rooting out bugs in the half-baked, slapped-on design that I had before yielded little but frustration. Were it not for the motivation and insight I got from some of the talks I heard on this first day, it might still be broken. So this conference is very quickly living up to its hype for me, and the project is beginning to get back on track, and I'm beginning to understand some of the ideas that I've had for it, both good and bad, quite a bit better.
This game as well as all future neocade games have already benefited from the knowledge and ideas that I've been getting at this conference, and I expect the rest of the week to bring even more goodness.
back to work...
Monday, February 28, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
project update
So, believe it or not, I am actually working on a project! :)
There's not much I'm ready to talk about right now, other than I will definitely be releasing it for Android, and it will be distributed entirely digitally (obviously).
Things are starting to kick into high gear. GDC is coming up. I've been messing around with Unity for a bit now, and am beginning to learn some slightly trickier stuff with it. The UI is very nice and allows for some cool things to be done quite easily, although it is not without quirks. I've been working mostly in Javascript with regard to coding. All the Unity tutorials are written in it, and I've dabbled in it in previous lives before, and it's fairly easy to pick up and does the job, at least with smaller script file sizes.
A few key gameplay mechanics are keeping me up at night. I like to make sure something is more or less just right before I move onto other things, but often times it just happens that I come up with one really awesome idea while I'm in the middle of implementing another really awesome idea.. So far, each new element I've added has been orthogonal to the rest, which makes each new iteration seem so much better than the last, and the whole process of making the game much more exciting. And each new element tends to keep small enough (otherwise it is usually abandoned pretty quickly) that it can be more or less completed by the time the next really awesome idea comes hurtling out of my head.
And so things begin to take shape after a while - the smaller elements come together to form an interlocking system and all kinds of cool things start to happen. It's easy to sit back and just marvel at one's creation when this happens, even though this is just the beginning and there's still a lot more work to do.
In terms of "everything else" and "when I expect to be done", what I can say is this: I expect for this to be just the beginning. I plan to ship pretty soon, and, if the reactions I've gotten so far from my friends have been any indication, I think you'll like what's coming. There is so much more yet to come, though.
Hope to blog at you again soon..
There's not much I'm ready to talk about right now, other than I will definitely be releasing it for Android, and it will be distributed entirely digitally (obviously).
Things are starting to kick into high gear. GDC is coming up. I've been messing around with Unity for a bit now, and am beginning to learn some slightly trickier stuff with it. The UI is very nice and allows for some cool things to be done quite easily, although it is not without quirks. I've been working mostly in Javascript with regard to coding. All the Unity tutorials are written in it, and I've dabbled in it in previous lives before, and it's fairly easy to pick up and does the job, at least with smaller script file sizes.
A few key gameplay mechanics are keeping me up at night. I like to make sure something is more or less just right before I move onto other things, but often times it just happens that I come up with one really awesome idea while I'm in the middle of implementing another really awesome idea.. So far, each new element I've added has been orthogonal to the rest, which makes each new iteration seem so much better than the last, and the whole process of making the game much more exciting. And each new element tends to keep small enough (otherwise it is usually abandoned pretty quickly) that it can be more or less completed by the time the next really awesome idea comes hurtling out of my head.
And so things begin to take shape after a while - the smaller elements come together to form an interlocking system and all kinds of cool things start to happen. It's easy to sit back and just marvel at one's creation when this happens, even though this is just the beginning and there's still a lot more work to do.
In terms of "everything else" and "when I expect to be done", what I can say is this: I expect for this to be just the beginning. I plan to ship pretty soon, and, if the reactions I've gotten so far from my friends have been any indication, I think you'll like what's coming. There is so much more yet to come, though.
Hope to blog at you again soon..
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