Matthew made a good suggestion that I should pick a short contest to give me a deadline and just something done, no matter how crappy. There’s actually a Ludum Dare contest this weekend, and I’m debating with myself if it’s fortuitous or folly to dive into it right now. On one hand it’s great timing, on the other I don’t think I’m ready enough to build my game in the time I have free in that 48-hr period. Instead, I think I’ll give myself a week starting from now to get a game done. That gives me a bit less pressure to constantly develop-develop-develop so I don’t ignore important things such as sleep, but is still a fairly tight schedule. The downsides are there isn’t a community working at the same time on a contest, there’s a bit less pressure to actually commit to that week deadline, and I won’t get as much peer review. I can mitigate that somewhat by posting about development both here and at my GameDev.net account, where shame of failure will keep me honest.

So let’s say: Midnight UTC Thursday, 17 December (11 am, my own local time) – I post my game. Sounds good.

As for topic, I’ve got a inclination to focus on something with a strategic bent. Let’s say: I’ve got to include a card-based gameplay element. I’ve wanted to experiment with one of those.

I’d also like to go back and use SDL and C. This is definitely

not

the best choice for a quick game building prototype language. But there’s this coder part of me that likes dealing with low-level stuff, designing architectures and spending hours tracking down obscure pointer bugs. There’s another part of me that argues that this is really stupid and then my brain goes into civil war, but if I’ve got a week I can spend some time of that working on mucking about in code to make me happy, tech-wise. Since this exercise is about fully kicking me out a rut, it might be good to give the old coder synapses a run. The other options are to use Flash or Python, both of which should work fine for the sort of games I have in mind, but I think I’ll give these a go in later weekly challenges.

Right and good. Let’s get started then, and see what this game-in-a-week challenge will lead.

I generally try not to post any (non-game related) research stuff here, but this is too brilliant not to mention:

The Fundamental Matrix Song

May contain scenes of mathematics. Man, this stuff seems a lot easier to follow in song form.

Missing making a blog post is more trouble than it’s worth. I’ve got several unfinished drafts of posts I meant to post ages ago, but the longer I leave it the more information I feel I need to cram into them. This in turn causes me to delay to think more about what I want to say, which completes the terrible cycle of non-posting. The point of this post is to break that cycle. If I can’t fit everything nicely into one post, I can always post it later.

November game development in review: If I had to describe the state of November in a word, it would probably be “floundering”. I started the month at the initial crossroads of development looking to make the first few strides towards my destination, and at the end of the month I’m still standing there feeling bewildered. Having thought about why I’m still there, I think the problem is not so much choosing from the insanely large number of paths available for development, but that I’m uncertain about exactly where it is I want to go. Without a clear direction to head in, I’ve been evaluating my options with the vague metric of “Well, does this path look interesting to me?”. The answer is always: yes, it does look interesting, but so do all those other paths over there; maybe they would be better? I’ve stuck myself in limbo, exploring what options are available to me rather than making a hard decision and sticking with it. It feels nice and productive while I’m doing it, and above all it feels safe and comfortable. But I’m never going to get anywhere without making a choice.

Compounding on this, I’ve hit a creative dry patch right when I need game ideas. Deep down, I was sort of hoping that while I was working on exploring the tech and libraries I’d be hit by a few bolts from the blue with great, feasible ideas that would excite me into planning them up. But I’m getting nothing. It’s rather frustrating. Given the time that has passed, I’m going to have to force the issue by writing up treatments on whatever stale ideas fizzle into my mind, no matter how painful it feels, and keep doing so until I find something serviceable. I don’t have to keep digging through ideas until I strike gold, but it would be nice to at least strike zinc.

For this month, my aim is simply to have a sensible, workable game goal to develop that I will achieve. Sounds simple, but to properly find a goal with confidence I need to: make some fairly solid decisions about the direction I want to go in, platforms to develop for, genres etc.; come up with some workable ideas; choose my tech and art direction; have a workable prototype; and then have a development plan for how to get from prototype to release. Above all, I need to switch mentality from the “game development as a hobby” mode that I still think I’m stuck in. It’s more than a fair amount to do in three weeks, but it’s what is required for 2010.

Oh, and I need to figure out some better material to post in my blogs too. I envy those bloggers who can churn out interesting articles full of quality content at an alarming frequency. I have enough trouble just trying not to trip over my own grammar.

If you’re interested in vector graphics tools, the latest version of Inkscape (0.47) is now officially released. You can grab it from the Inkscape website.

New to 0.47 is the ability to edit SVG fonts. I’ll need to play around with this feature more to see how useful it is, but I suspect that Inkscape along with the free font editor FontForge will be a great free software combo for font creation.

Hey, everyone! The blog’s not dead; I’ve just been really bad at deciding what is worth putting in it. This weekend I’m revising my plan for the whole Trazoi website-and-game-development thing, and I should be back to making semi-regular blog posts and site updates once that is sorted.

In case you’ve missed the news, you can get an indie licence for Unity for free.

Unity is a 3D engine and integrated development tool, and one I’ve heard good things about from other developers. Even before this free deal, it was my most likely pick for 3D development. Now there’s no need to worry about running of time to test the demo, it’s worth grabbing a copy to play around with at your leisure. And it comes for both Windows and Mac OS, which is good for people like me who use both OSes. Even if you’ve got designs on making your own engine, Unity could be a useful tool for prototyping. Give it a go.

For me, I haven’t done much more that a superficial play around with the demo yet so despite my recommendations to try out Unity. I can’t objectively say if it’s any good or not. I prefer working in 2D and doubt I’ll need too complex an engine behind what I do, so I’m still set on using Flash, Flex and ActionScript as my prototyping platform. But for anything 3D, it’s well worth looking at the middlewares available, and you can’t beat a good deal like trying Unity for free!

Man, this year is going by quickly. I still can’t quite get that we’re already a fair ways into October. I’ve got no idea where the time is going.

I’ve got to make a decision at the end of December as to the direction I take game development, and I’m a teensy bit concerned at my current progress; I’ve been drifting in the “warm-up” stage for way too long. Without a few milestones to focus on I’ve been a right mess.

With this in mind it’s high time I restart my “game a week” challenge. The rules this time are very simple; I make something playable each week. It doesn’t need to be fancy or even complete, but I do need to work on something else the next week. The goal is simply to stop worrying too much about the unimportant little details and start creating.

To start, I’m going to keep playing around with Flash and make something simple. I’m still tweaking the nose of ActionScript’s functionality, so it’s probably going to just be a Flash game classic straight from the pages of Flash Game University (I own the book). Got to start somewhere!

I’ve been reminded that NaNoWriMo 2009 is coming up. NaNoWriMo is the National Novel Writing Month; it is now technically very international, but the previous acronym has more punch. Basically what the event entails is writing 50,000 words of a new novel during the month of November. It’s an exercise to stop procrastinating and start writing.

My creative juices really need a boost right now and levelling up my creative writing stat would help me in the long run, so I’m planning on giving this a go this year. Given my lack of skill in this area I’m sure that whatever I spit out will be beyond awful, so forgive me if I don’t post much about what I’m actually writing in my blog. It will however be good to be forced to crank out material on a tight deadline.

So far I’ve just skimmed over the basics of the ActionScript 3 language and played around with them in a Hello World style class. On the surface it has a rather Java like feel to me, although given my sketchy understanding of Java that might just be a conflation of my unfamiliarity of the two languages. Another similarity is that given the strong GUI bent a lot of basic instruction tends towards cut-and-paste programming; find something that is close to what you want, then tweak it to fit your needs. I suppose that is quite apt for something that I want to use for prototyping, but with that approach I always feel uncomfortable that I don’t truly understand the language. I’ve skimmed enough to look into a proper app, I think. Nothing too fancy, but enough to get a feel for the development process.

On the non-development front, I finally got around to playing (and finishing) Portal on the weekend. Good game, although very short; only took a few hours, at least one hour of which was just playing around with the portals. I’ve also got no idea why the internet has latched onto “The cake is a lie” as the primary meme, given there were plenty of better lines than that the game.

Brief progress update, condensed blog post version: The last week was a mess due to my own lack of focus. How embarrassing. Without some hard milestones I have a tendency to aimlessly drift off towards some of the more vague objectives in the back of my mind, and before I know it I’ve spent three days during “research” (i.e., reading TV Tropes and playing Spelunky). Not good. Bad game developer!

Given these slips are turning into a habit, I’ll spend the next month posting blog updates every couple of days to keep some sense of responsibility and to steer me naturally towards harder, quantifiable targets that provide something to show. I can’t hide a lack of progress if it’s out in the open!

I have spent some time reviewing Box2D though, and it’s good enough to sell me on using Flash and AS3 (ActionScript 3) as my prototyping platform. I don’t think I’m currently good enough with it to effortless whip up ideas with ease, which I think is a sticking point at the moment. I suspect I need to take a step back and shore up on the fundamentals.

By the end of October, I aim to be comfortable enough with Flash that I can prototype key game ideas and assess their suitability as the basis for long term projects. For next week, I’ll work through a few basic Flash exercises, explore my way through AS3, and actually put a game up on this website (finally!) even if it’s a basic clone.

I also need to knuckle down and work on systematically on improving my art and music, which I’ve been shamefully neglecting. And the website needs work, so that’s on the to-do list too.