It’s been quite a “not much coding” and a reflecting sort of a week for me personally, however the team is busy as ever and making significant progress.
Project number 2 (which I hope we can announce VERY soon) is coming along quite nicely, it’s really good to see the team making progress and being buoyant about it too. As I have hinted at before, the game itself is entirely different to Blast! Its one of those games that has the “just one more go” mentality to it. I’ve started some very early work on a mini “side project” to Project Blast! too. Something that I’m hoping we can bang on our website and encourage some community “top scores” to be fought over, more on that another week.
In terms of Blast! I am at a bit of a development crossroads. The variable issues I was having are still prevalent but it’s given me a lot of food for thought; primarily revolving around my code being very poorly designed and messy. I’m certain I can think of dozens of ways to do things better and lose the code bloat, but they are largely code processes I am unfamiliar with. Of course the old adage “nothing ventured, nothing gained” is ringing in my head. The issue is that what I really need to do is spend a lot more time preparing the code before I attempt to re-factor it. I need to plan which function is going to do what and which Class is going to handle what element. I also still need to figure out some of the nuances of C++ which would make my life a lot easier. There’s just SO much to take in and consider. I learn best by actually DOING stuff, so whilst I totally understand the various principals being thrown at me, the code sometimes boggles me a bit, and therefore I avoid attempting to use the code preferring to use more complicated methods. I was also told that “providing the game works, it doesn’t matter how it works” which is something I’m clinging to at the moment. I will add that the person that said that to me also added a disclaimer along the lines of “provided you aren’t working with other programmers in a team” – which I’m not really on Blast! but it would make my life a lot easier if I was! So maybe a re-factor at this stage would actually be a really good thing… I need to chat this over with our C++ guru later before a decision is made, but I may well take a leap of faith and just go for broke and try and learn some new stuff!
Our art chap/website guru is also talking about changing our website design a bit too – so keep your browsers pointed to www.adarakion.com – although this was only mentioned the other day, so I don’t know what his timescale is for this yet, let alone when you guys will get to see it! Actually, don’t point your browsers there yet – you will get a bit bored waiting!
In terms of managing the team, we now have weekly conferences whereby we all bring each other up to speed with what is happening with out respective projects and I can attempt to fill the team in on other areas (such as funding, project planning etc.). The team does feel really quite tight and productive at the moment, and confidence feels high.
One of the things I’m struggling personally with is focussing on one thing at a time. My mind is racing with SO many ideas it’s quite apparent that I’m either a) a nut job or b) a lot more creative than I gave myself credit for! That’s all well and good but incredibly distracting when trying to focus on two or three projects at a time, it’s SO easy to think “Ill just code this cool idea I’ve just had” and then realise you’ve sank a good few hours into something that you will perhaps use once, if ever! So trying to keep my own runaway mind in check is proving a challenge too! I think this trait heralds back to my Amiga coding days. I must’ve had 30-40 floppy discs with stuff on that I had started coding and never really progressed too far with. I dearly wish I had kept all those discs and could look at some of the stuff I was attempting to do now. There would’ve more than likely been a cracking couple of ideas in there – even if 90% of it was rubbish! Happy days.
I remember a dream of mine was to develop a football management game – but nothing like your Championship Manager (as was king at the time), more along the lines of fantasy leagues, player and club names and something that was fun and easy to play without taking up hours of your time in tedious micro management stuff. There was a game on the Amiga which captured it beautifully, whose name I now forget, but basically you were a football manager and you sat at your desk and had to answer the phone when it rang, water your plant (otherwise it would demonstrate poor attention span etc). I’m sure some aged readers amongst you will enlighten me as to its name. I really still would like to do something like that some day, so maybe that could be Project #4…… Ill start to do some coding for that now…. ARRRRRG!