Distilled Pursuit

I'm trying to make it so that I don't miss this month completely from making a blog entry, and it looks like I've barely made it, but made it I have. Spring is hear and with it is a rejuvenated sense of purpose.

As I sit down to continue working on the GoG project this week and complete some good portions of it, I can't help but begin to get excited with anticipation to getting back to work on troglodyte. It's been almost two months since I've done any work on the game engine, and I have to say I'm getting antsy. GDC being last week made it all that much work, especially as I on looked to all the indie coverage. I really wanted to go this year, but it just wasn't the time yet. Thanks to all the guys at TIGSource that attended, for posting links to many many pics, videos, and wordage of what looked like an excellent experience.

The book that I won from John Hattan arrived almost a month ago now, and while I'm only about halfway through it, hey I don't have as much time to read as I'd like these days :P , I have to say I'm enjoying it quite a bit. It's helping me think about structuring the business aspects of my endeavors and it has some good advice in it. I plan to write a review to post on my website at some point, a long with some other reviews that I wrote last year for some other programming books.

At any rate, I'm pretty optimistic about things. I have roughly four years left in my current time line for planning to get things off the ground and so far I'd have to say I'm on track for the most part. I think taking the time off from working on the engine will pay off in the long run, especially having worked mainly on it for the last two years. The breather has been pretty nice, but now I'm ready to get back on the road, hit it running and hit it hard.

The time off has given me time to re-establish a base line of quality for my work as well. There have been areas in the engine where I've been meaning to go in and change a certain feature, but have repeatedly put it off instead to work on adding more features. Not that the features being ignored were ungodly beasts gumming up the works by any means, but they were things that I wanted to do differently. Once I start revamping to port the windowing, serialization, and other components over to Qt, I realize that it's the perfect time to re-asses the things that I want to redo and go a head and do them.

The GoG project and porting the code over to the Qt frame work is going to delay the first beta release of the engine, but in moving a few more steps closer to my ultimate design goals, it'll be worth it. I was doing a weekly indie game review over on the GoG for a few weeks last year. I think it's something that I'm going to shoot for doing once again.