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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.
So, as I continue working on learning various web languages and working on continuing to learn Qt, I begin to notice a continuing trend of getting away from game development. This is something that I have to keep in mind in the future, but for now, current paths must be continued until the current journeys come to an end.
So, Ajax, Mysql, and php are the newest members to the arsenal of development tools in my tool box. I'm having quite a bit of fun getting to know them, working on the decipherone website. I'm also getting to know web standards in the process, which has been interesting. Although I've been using websites, I never really noticed how much the development process has changed for them over the last decade. It just goes to show my lack of education in the area prior to the last few months that I've been preparing to tackle the GoG tournament connection tool and building the community website to promote Troglodyte and indie games in general.
While it's interesting and practical , and I could see myself doing it for a living, I just don't have the time to continue to do web development, work on a game engine, design games, make games, work a full time job, and fit the other hats in my life on my head. As stated currently, I've had to set aside the game development aspect, and it's something that I really want to get back to. So as I finally come to the forks in the road, I need to get back to the initial cause.
It looks like April will be the month where I actually get time to port the current code base of the engine over to using Qt. As I do that I'm thinking that I am going to need to finish the game state management that still isn't complete at this time, before starting to build the next edition of Scribe, the editor. By that time the official release of Qt creator should be out as well, which should be awesome. Qt will also be releasing version 4.5 in march, which will add a LGPL license, which should help with marketability for Troglodyte.
At this point in time I'd like to say this. The main reason of this game engine and editing suite is to provide a tool for myself and fellow companions to make games, do it well , and fast. I'm choosing to release it to the public after an agreed upon time in between myself and the guys of Phyersoft. In doing so, my hope is not to become rich from the endeavor, although if that happens it would be welcomed. Instead, it's my hope to provide a very affordable tool that is easy enough for a complete newb to use, while still having enough power to entice seasoned developers.
By having it be open source as well, I'm hoping that it give those who are interested in coding a good place to begin to learn about programming games. That is also the purpose of the website. Also, I hope to grow as a programmer because for the most part I'm self taught and I'd love for those who would be interested in looking at the code base to be able to offer and make suggestions.
In addition, I'd love to see people become passionate about the project and for it to grow into a robust development tool owned by the global community. Only time will tell if these hopes and dreams will be attained, but it should be an interesting journey to get to cultivation of the ideas.
This is the first blog post of 2009. I'm excited to be in a new year and am looking forward to making this the most successful and productive year yet. Last year there was a pretty steady increase in my blogging habits. I ended up with 48 which averages out to one post a week. This year I have a blogging goal of 100, all rich with useful information in content.
So, I've been diving into the world of Qt the last few days, and so far, I have to say that I'm very impressed. I've been looking for an alternative to MFC on windows for a long time, but never really wanted to get into .net coding. It has also been a goal to make Troglodyte cross-platform from the very beginning, but I was never really sure how to do it. While I currently don't have a Linux or Mac box to compile my projects on, using Qt at least provides the frame work for me to be able to do so in the future.
In addition to using Qt, I'm also in the process of learning their custom IDE Qt Creator and I have to say I like it very much so far. It's still in Beta, but it's pretty functional. The IDE can be setup to use various compilers, but comes setup with the GNU GCC, which I haven't messed with since I first started to learn C++ six years ago. I have to say I'm fairly pleased with the compiler as well.
I've been wanting to get away from Microsoft specific products for sometime for various reasons. Don't get me wrong. I like the products that Microsoft makes. I've enjoyed using visual studio for the length of time that I have, but what I have never really liked is how Microsoft has seemingly set out to Monopolize the markets that they are in. Collaborative work and allowing others to learn from what you have done allows for true progress to be made. While Microsoft has gotten a little better due to pressure from government agencies and users themselves, it still seems like things will always be in a certain light from Microsoft. I'll continue to use Microsoft products such as windows(as long as the Windows7 doesn't go the way of the vista) and as a software developer will be required too as it's still the major piece of the market pie.
The main reason for wanting to switch however is simply to be able to cater to the rest of the market. As well as use tools with little to no restrictions that I don't have to worry about licensing issues and I can share with the community that I'm hoping to build around the game engine. In addition Qt Creator is light weight and provides support for C++ which is the only language that I develop in, besides python.
So, as I've been learning Qt, I have to say that I'm very impressed. There is functionality put into these collection of libraries that will not only allow for simple cross-platform compilation and serialization issues, but also allow for things such as resolution of localization issues and rapid application development. I'm hoping that this will cut down development time on the editor by more then half.
The website is still coming along, as well as the tournament connection system for the GoG. I'm going to try and get the majority of the remaining design knocked out for that system today. It's great to finally have a couple of consecutive days off from work to get things done.
September is here already and although I've done better this year then any other at blogging I still haven't met a lot of my goals in that area, but things happen, people get busy, and time goes by, just like every other year and every other life.
At any rate, as per usual, I've been pretty busy. As previously mentioned, I'm still working on building the site over at www.decipherone.com , but it's been kind of slow going, along with production on the game engine. I haven't really been spreading myself too thin, more so I've been getting side tracked a lot with spending time with friends and also getting some other projects going.
One such project is getting involved with the guys over at www.gatheringofgamers.com . This is a great social networking site that is geared specifically towards gaming. With the exception of the great games experiment, I haven't been one for social sites, but this is one that I've actually been somewhat active in this year. I met the president Ben at our first game developer group meeting last year, and managed to meet up with him again and the site intern Zach (aka RyuBlitz on the site)a few weeks ago where we played some disc-golf, some 360 and had a few drinks. We had a great time.
At any rate, I'm very impressed with the site as it's grown to near 2,000 members as of this writing in a little over a year(just over as of August 26), and people keep getting more and more involved. There are plans for me to help out with some contract work as well as help promote the site and attempt to get some networking opportunities set up. It is dedicated to helping gamers network. You set up a profile and have friends, classic social site style.
Last week there was also the addition of a clan system that is used to help those involved in gaming ladders keep track of their members. The site has recently seen an onslaught of KSI members join since the system first went live and we expect to see numbers continue to grow.
Ben recently got back from New York last week where he went to meet up with the Microsoft based company Massive which specializes in in game advertisement. The plan is that the GoG is going to be in charge of a gaming event in New York in November.
Other interesting opportunities have happened for this small upstart, like attending E3 and plans to attend the Major League Gaming Playoffs in Dallas Texas in October.
If you are a gamer and you're looking for a place to hook up with other gamers, then the GoG is the place for you. Stop on by and check out some profiles, find other peoples gaming tags and meet up with them on line. Come be a part of a growing community that has of yet seen it's peak time. With many more plans for the future, get into the Gathering while the getting's good.
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