GBGamesFor this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 188.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 432 / 1000
Target: 714
Ahem…those numbers above haven’t changed in a week, and I think it is the first time it has happened since I started tracking my progress in the Thousander Club.
On the other hand, I did spend a good portion of the week catching up on all sorts of things. I’m finally getting things organized again, which leaves me with less stress. I should see a good turnaround in the coming week.
These days I am generally trying to catch up with all of the weekly reviews I haven’t been doing, but I received a bit of news in my inbox that caught my eye: Game Console Vulnerability Identified.
Apparently it isn’t completely new news as the PSP has had security vulnerabilities before, but wow! How long will it be before someone finds something similar on the XBox?
For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 188.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 432 / 1000
Target: 693
The deadline for IGF 2007 has come and gone. It’s September, and I am not even close to selling a game of mine on my website. Well, I’ve been meaning to update my business plan for some time, and now that I’ve basically missed every date I have ever set, now would be a good time to do so.
I feel like I need to “get back to fundamentals” as Michael Jordan would say, but I realized that I don’t know what the fundamentals of game development would be. I feel that by expending so much energy on making a component-based game engine, I am preventing myself from making a game. And I’ve never made a Pong clone before, which means it is complex enough to be a real challenge for me. How is it that I’ve been working on projects for over a year and still haven’t made anything playable? What made me think that Pong would be too easy but an entire game framework, specifically a component-based one, wouldn’t be too hard?
I’m going to focus my limited energies on making a Pong clone. Am I scrapping my engine? Hardly, but without the experience of writing a few games, I don’t think I can even begin to identify those things that my engine would need to be able to do. I don’t like that I’ve now switched to a different project twice this year, but I feel like I am spinning my wheels trying to make a component-based game engine. I’ve managed to make some good components that I can probably copy and paste into a more “hard-coded” engine without too many changes, so the past five months or so haven’t been a total loss. Maybe I just needed the experience of biting off more than I can chew.
As has been said before, game development is tough. Even if you have a ready-made engine, making a game is a difficult thing to do. I’m of the mind that the code, the engine, is just infrastructure to support the game and is NOT the game itself. While an open-source component-based engine would be nice to have, I just don’t have the experience, knowledge, and resources to make one that would be useful in a timely manner. When I can prove that I can make Pong and other game clones, maybe then I can have a better idea of what it takes to make an engine that would make all of those games. Making a Tetris clone is something that still makes me nervous whenever I think about how to implement the various pieces and how to spin them.
Saying the above means admitting that I am still a beginner at game development. Maybe a little wiser than I was a year or two ago, but still a beginner. Pong is supposed to be relatively easy, though. Perhaps it might only take me a month of part-time work to create it.
Cliffski has posted a Kudos game design post-mortem.
Witness the powers of Johnny Depp and Mel Gibson as they help to develop the concept and UI for one of the most anticipated indie games of the year! Cliffski noted that GUI design is especially tough when you are creating something that is different from anything else out there. While the article is short, it does provide some insight into the design process of a successful indie game developer.
Action has published another indie interview. Josiah Pisciotta is co-founder of Chronic Logic, creators of innovative games such as Gish, Bridge Construction Set, and Triptych.
Josiah talked about how he got started in game development, how he handled the business of running Chronic Logic, and how he and co-founder Alex Austin developed various game ideas. I thought that it was especially interesting to hear about the evolution of Gish.
For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 185.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 432 / 1000
Target: 672
There are 5 days left until the deadline for entering a game in IGF 2007: Countdown to IGF 2007
I dedicated this past weekend to game development, and while I didn’t get too much done or spend as much time as I wanted to spend, I still managed to be somewhat productive. I have been working with some physics code that I managed to get integrated with my component-based engine. It works, but too well. That is, I want to try to make a Pong clone just to demonstrate that the engine is useful, but so far it seems like I would need to completely rewrite some parts of the physics code in order to make it less realistic, which defeats the purpose of having it in the first place. I’ll keep the code around as it may be useful for a future project, but for now I will be writing some basic collision detection and response code to get a bouncing ball to bounce off of paddles and walls.
When I try to squeeze game development into the rest of my life, it feels like everything encroaches on it; however, when I make game dev a big priority, I notice that other aspects of my life start to falter.
I have a regular day job, and I try to work on my own projects as well. Then I have the other aspects of my life, such as girlfriend, friends, family, cats, playing video games, reading books, keeping track of my finances, this blog, etc. It all adds up to a need for more effective uses of my time.
I know that I am sitting most of the time, which is why I am making an effort to exercise. I have read that getting your heart rate up for 30 minutes a day for at least three days a week is ok, and five days is better. I’ve been walking or running home from work, which has helped. I was 195 lbs (88.45 kg) about this time last year, and now I am 173 lbs (78.47 kg). I definitely hit my goal of losing 20 lbs, and I feel better when I breathe deeply or move quickly these days. Pickup basketball or soccer games are much more fun when you aren’t gasping for air. B-)
Physical health is important, but so is mental health. As you know, I keep track of the books I read. I’ve been trying to read a book a week, and for some time this year I was even a couple of books ahead of schedule. Since I’ve been concentrating on getting my game dev hours up, you can see that I am a few books behind.
My backup computer has failed, and I’ve yet to get it up and running even though I have had over a month. I have yet to make an appointment for a physical with my doctor or a dentist appointment for an opinion on my wisdom teeth. I have a number of tasks on my todo lists that have been there for weeks or months. There are still games that I haven’t had a chance to play. Civilization 3 is still unopened on my shelf, my Prince of Persia: Sands of Time save game has been about 50% complete for quite a few months, I haven’t gotten anywhere with DROD, and I’m still hoping to play games I have for the N64! As a game developer, I’m behind when it comes to actually playing games.
My project is moving along, especially in the past month when I have been doing a much better job of working on it. Does everything else getting put off become a natural consequence of essentially working two jobs, leaving little time for anything else, or can I be more careful about balancing my life?
One person told me that he does things in spurts. One week he’ll play games, then the next week is all work, although he didn’t say that he purposely scheduled his weeks in this way. It sounded like it was based on whim rather than conscious choice, though. Perhaps if I purposely decided that this day or week is dedicated to specific aspects of my life, I wouldn’t feel that they are getting neglected. After all, they are on my calendar, so when their time comes, they’ll be dealt with. You can’t schedule everything, of course, but for those things that you can schedule, they can get blocks of time set aside.
Exercise isn’t really something you can do in spurts. You’re either exercising or you’re not. Reading books is something you can do in spurts, though. I could probably finish my current book and a couple of other books if I dedicate an entire day or weekend to it. I could take an entire week to play video games, catching up on what I’ve been missing.
But if I schedule a week to a specific set of tasks, I then worry that it will be a month before I get to something. I don’t know if it will result in balance as it is more like consciously choosing to unbalance myself. If I play games one week, read books and articles the next, that’s two weeks in which no progress is getting made on game development. On the other hand, I could do a better job of dedicating certain days to certain tasks.
I was stressed when I was trying to work 20 hours on game dev and still expected to fit everything else into the week as well. I was setting vague and unrealistic goals without realizing it, and I don’t think I was fun to be around. I’ve been neglecting my weekly reviews, so I need to reboot my organizational tools, as I have too many calendars and lists. I need to make conscious decisions about how I am going to spend my day, my week, my month, and my year.
None of the above is really all that new. It’s just nice to remind myself once in awhile since I seem to fall in and out of it.
Russell Carroll, the mastermind behind Game Tunnel, the popular indie game review site, has announced the premier issue of the quarterly Game Tunnel Magazine.
It features news, previews, reviews, interviews, and in-depth articles. It is also a good summary of some of the major happenings on the Game Tunnel website. My name is printed in there, so that’s a bonus. B-)
For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 176 / 1000
Game Ideas: 432 / 1000
Target: 651
There are 12 days left until the deadline for entering a game in IGF 2007: Countdown to IGF 2007
It’s interesting that when you don’t like going to a job or to school, the weekend can take forever to get here, but when you want to try to do something or otherwise like what you are doing, Friday was yesterday and today.
Just like that, a week has gone by, and I don’t remember what I have accomplished. I should do a better job of keeping track of my accomplishments by date.