Picklesworth's Profile - 254 Karma
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4.67
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- Joined on Mar. 21. 2007
- I am still getting into this whole indie game development scene. It is neat to have such easy communication with so many talented developers and thanks to them sites like this are a great source of inspiration. I like to see what other people are doing, and to put our heads together and help each other to build some truly awesome software.
I usually use text boxes like this to write enormous Atwood-esque (*shudder* great meaning, ideas and stories, and she is really an excellent and deserving writer... but the digressions... the metaphors that shouldn't be)... err, sorry... I usually use text boxes like this to write enormous rambles, but (as of now) I will try not to. After a lot of toying with HTML, Javascript (and why Javascript is not a suitable game development language), and Game Maker 4 I finally decided to try some "proper" programming; with the numerous troubles I had had bumping boundary after boundary, I decided that perhaps just doing the whole thing was not as horrible as I had previously believed. I soon started going with a nice, easy but powerful language called Blitz 3D. It served me pretty well for learning the ins and outs of programming and since BlitzCoder was still alive at the time I had some great tutorials to follow along. I never finished anything amazing with it, but I /did/ make a rather cool nuclear reactor simulator and it gave me some much-needed confidence to keep going with programming instead of driving myself crazy with those point & click game builders.
Lately I have moved on to BlitzMax and I am laying down the foundations for my first reasonably adventurous game project. (These "foundations" are the graphics engine - I am modifying Simon Harrison's MiniB3D into a highly extensible open 3D engine that follows the same simplified design). I can't tell you much about /the game/ because if I were to spill the beans then someone would be after the idea for sure (it's that good!), but I can tell you this: It's code-named Equilibrium and it's awesome. (And it is physics-based, which is all the rage these days).
I am a big fan of open source software - particularly Linux, particularly Ubuntu and particularly the Gnome project. I don't know why I like the Gnome project since I really do have some noisy rants about a lot of the stuff they come up with (Screensaver theme engines: WHY?! Disks admin missing for a year: How hard is this?! ...Err, sorry), but they are really well organized and have a very clean / useful web site. All in all a very welcoming and professional group. People say that if they haven't innovated yet, they aren't going to, but I disagree: The organization and professionalism of the Gnome group is outstanding and an innovation in itself.
I like their ideas behind good software design, which go back to the roots of GNU/Linux and why the Linux terminal is such a great interface: Each program does one thing, and it does that thing well. Those long strings of commands? (Even the simple ones like kill `pidof stupidgksu`). Those are amazing and because of lazy developers in the world of GUI they are a dying art. In my bracketed example, those are two commands: kill which kills a process, and pidof which gets the process id for a process. They have no idea that either one exists but they work in unity perfectly. Pidof outputs the right process ID, kill uses that output to kill stupid gksu (which has a nasty habit of NOT APPEARING but still consuming memory on my computer). This is why I like the very lightweight / desktop integrated Epiphany web browser; it does web browsing and leaves everything else to software that already exists! (Which is why I like Gnome and ever bothered to check out the Gnome developer resources and bothered to brush up on my C so I could start prodding Epiphany into a browser that suits my very specific wishes).
Anyway, I don't even know what this box is for so I'd better stop writing before something bad happens.
Err... that's me, I guess?
This is a great web site and I look forward to seeing how it shapes up. A games site isn't new and a community site isn't new, but having this type of community with this sort of ratings system in a simple and quick to use games site really is new territory. Having developers and the audience closely knit into one community instead of in two separate camps will be fascinating, and maybe even productive. I can't wait to see how it all works!
Hm... 500 words...
:-o
Oops, I hope this doesn't stretch the page!
LOADING......
