Day Seven

One week, eh? So, to the folks this evening for roast chicken, not back home until late. Still managed to get P4 set up, and a skeleton workspace in place. A bit weird to go back to using it after many months of SVN, but it's all good. My milestone is to have the dev environment sorted by tomorrow, so day eight is going to be a big one; I need third party libs submitted, building and linking against a hello world app.

Day Six

Really wanted to set up P4 today, but, even with an extra hour in the day, I failed to make the time. I should be able to do better than that, so I'm pretty annoyed at myself. And tomorrow won't be any better, because we go to my folks for dinner, and generally don't get home until pretty late. So, my future self, I'm sorry for doing so poorly at this early stage of the project. Promise I'll do better! Things should definitely pick up by Tuesday and Wednesday; see if they don't.

Day Five

Again with the nothing. I was starting to question whether it's a good idea to blog daily about a project when I only get an occasional hour here or there to work on it, but I think the routine of writing something will help keep me motivated to actually finish something for once. Still looking forward to setting up the environment; still not getting any time to! So, to bed with Making Money.

Day Four

Nothing. No progress today. Too busy at work, and came home to dinner + wine + movie, so a bit difficult to focus. And so to bed!

Day Three

Nothing done today. Been doing work (for my day job) while a film crew works across the street, shooting a feature with a new-fangled RED ONE 4k digital camera. I do have time to think about things, though. What I need to do is get P4 set up so that Box2D and HGE are checked in, then create a HelloWorld project and check that in, and then create a build process so that the libs and the exe get built, and that all works. After that I'll be pretty close to having a bare-bones environment to start prototyping in.

Day Two

Phew... suck of a day at work. Trying to take criticism in a good way, but it can't help but feel like fingerpointing. Makes having a separate project at home a breath of fresh air. Didn't achieve much with it tonight, though, due to lack of time. Got P4 installed, got a FogBugz trial sorted, downloaded VC++ express, downloaded Box2D and HGE, had a quick bash at building stuff and that's yer lot.

Don't want to spend too much time setting things up. Deadlines look a bit like this:

• April1: Dev environment established (i.e. pipeline for writing code, building it, testing it)
• May1: Prototype done and dusted (i.e. prove we can actually make a game)
• June1: Alpha version ready (i.e. core gameplay sorted)
• July1: Beta ready (i.e. feature lock, just bugfix, optimisation and polish to go)
• August1: Ship!

So, a few more days to sort out the environment, then. Wish me luck!

Day One

I don't have much time, and I don't have a snazzy computer, but some classic games were built in short order on very primitive machines 30 years ago, so I don't see what's holding me back. My deadline is Nullabor 2008, which, I think, is going to be held with GO3, which is happening on August 1. Don't know when the submission deadline will be, though. Another deadline is work related, and is June 1. So that'll give me two months. Until then, I've a bit of time in the evenings to plan and prototype.

All I know now is I want 2D, perhaps with physics, and with some nice pixel art supplied by a mate who's willing to be involved. I have a sketchy idea for a game that involes time travel, but I reckon I'll start with getting something moving around on-screen, and see where that takes us.

I'll be developing for Windows, in C++, and potentially with Python or Ruby or LUA tacked on. Right now I'm looking at hge for the engine and Box2d for physics. So the first task will be downloading those guys and getting them to build. They're both free, even for commercial use, and look pretty straightforward. Should be fun.

I should also get me a game controller, because keyboard control sucks the arsepipe.