quarta-feira, 23 de fevereiro de 2011

Trying to Keep it Simpler, doing more with less (effort)

- Going through the continuous process of learning, doing, and learning from doing.
- Reducing the scope for what I want to do, and go through the process of starting, developing and finishing my projects.
- Dealing with demotivation and boredom, by cycling projects - start project A, reach a point where I'm bored/tired/demotivated, get interested in project B, reach that same point, and go back to project A, now with a fresh outlook on it, and breaking through the point where I got stuck previously.

- having lots of fun with ActionScript, can't recommend it enough for simpler games (unfortunately current Flash performance is weak, allows the creation of games similar to the Super Nintendo, on a technology/performance level)

- creating a few games for Flash, using ActionScript, Flixel and FlashDevelop as the Integrated Development Environment. Reading stuff about business, game business and flash game business, how to monetize the games I'm making.

- swore off C/C++, due to annoyingly complicated and unnecessary stuff like includes, defining/using static classes (as enums), errors due to having to manually manage memory, compilation, using other libraries, and language complexity in general. I want to develop fun games, not become a C++ pro, and I feel I waste lots of time dealing with the "low level" part of the language.

Trying out doing stuff in Java using the "Slick" library, for projects more advanced than Flash allows (hardware accelerated drawing, heavy processing, etc). Java pretty much skips/solves all of these problems, and if I need performance, I can always learn how to invoke dlls from Java and code heavier functions in C (although Java's bad reputation on performance is something that isn't always true, if some care is taken when coding).