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Well, I'm preparing for my move on Saturday... Still have heaps of laundry to do and crates to fill with crap I don't want to throw away... A nice person on craigslist is giving me a free couch! Yay!

Anyway, I've decided on a name for my Tetris clone falling block game: Wrong Century. It runs entirely in a win32 console window, so the graphics are pretty much dinosaur-esque, but the gameplay matches the modern guidelines for Tetris that popular russian falling block game... Hence the name.

I know "win32 console game" makes it sound like it was trivial to implement... But you wouldn't believe the crap I had to go through to get things looking right... I had to import undocumented functions from kernel32.dll (basically, stuff Microsoft doesn't want developers to use and doesn't make available to anyone except their own developers) and create a thread that pretends to be the preferences menu, just so I could do things like adjust the font size and change the color palette... It's amazing how many people ask about this stuff on forums, yet how everyone replies "it's impossible!" Well, Decade-old newsgroups 1 - Forums 0!

Youtube videos:

I'm experimenting with a few original and (hopefully) unique game modes, some of which revolve around sound. Right now, I'm sending raw MIDI commands to the sound driver by feeding it notes from an array, but I'm working on something more elaborate.

No download for now, I'm holding onto the game until it's ready to be released.

Small detour: I'm making a Tetris clone falling block game to brush up on my coding skills. Models are done.

Two weeks since I started modeling stuff. Now you must be thinking, "holy crap, he must have millions of models and textures and nice stuff to show!"

BZZT. Sorry. You lose. I have this:

And that's about it.

The past two weeks were a bit intense... I had this 500 page book to read, followed by a 10 page analysis of said book to write... And then I had to write a 10 page short story that ended up being 20 pages. When I finally handed everything in, I went to bed a bit tired, but glad that it was all finally over with... Only to wake up at 2AM with a headache and fever.

So the real work starts now. I have an exam on the 18th, and I'm moving to a new place on the first week of May... The rest is pretty much free time. Hooray!

The design document is almost done. I have written up a list of things I need to do first and foremost, they are the following:

1. Create a few models to use in my early tech demos

2. Finalize the file format for player models, NPC models and objects, create a Windows tool for skeletal animation using this format, and make a small demo available that shows the main character in action

3. Finalize the file format for indoors maps, create a Windows tool that allows me to add a layer of objects on top of a level mesh, and make a small "walk around" demo available with support for some scripting (doors that open when the character walks near them, NPCs that talk to you when you walk in front of them and activate them)

4. Finalize the way universe data is parsed, create a Windows tool that allows me to design my universe by creating groups of objects, such as solar systems or asteroid fields, and make a small "fly around" demo available that allows the player to move around the universe and orbit planets.

5. Finalize the file format for planets, create a Windows tool that allows me to automatically generate maps and manually refine them, and make a small "walk around" demo on a sample planet.

6. Work on AI and simulate simple behaviors, create a Windows tool that allows me to create creature entries and define stats for different species, and make a small "watching the animals" demo that shows a small population of animals and plants going about their everyday business.

7. Create an engine for the battle system and make a small "space battle" demo available that shows two AI players fighting each other to the death.

8. Stitch it all up and think of what to do next.

That's quite a hefty list of things to do, but it gives you an idea of what I'll be showing off in the coming months. I will detail the process of each step as I work through them.

I'll go to bed now. I'll start making some sample models tomorrow. I already have the main character pretty much done, but I need a lot more generic models, like a generic indoors map to walk around in, a few asteroids, a generic ship, a generic NPC, etc...

Oh, by the way, I decided that the game would be "cel-shaded." Wind Waker is pretty much my favorite game, and I think cel-shading looks super radical like, duuude. Great excuse to have unrealistic shadows, too :P

I've worked on so many projects in the past that sounded great but never led to anything, that I'm starting to doubt in my ability to bring this project to fruition.

I started programming seriously mainly for my website, when I learned PHP. I met a few shady characters... "Hey, join my team, work now, get paid when we make it big!" "If you manage to make this work, the first thousand dollars I make are yours to keep." I was young and gullible. That was my introduction to the "50% phenomenon." For some mysterious reason, whenever you have a poorly coordinated team working on something, you get about 50% of the project done, and then everyone stops working. They just look at each other but don't bother to ask, "what now?" The leader stops replying to e-mails, citing "hard disk crashes" (which only ever happen to people with important data or responsibilities), and the inability to get back online in less than 3 weeks due to various personal problems. Eventually, someone decides to put things on hold. A couple of months later, the website disappears, and no evidence remains that you ever worked for anyone.

I haven't always been the victim, though. I've done my fair share of disappointing. When you start working from home on various projects, things get depressing. You'll take a day off once to focus on cleaning your place up. Nobody's watching you; you can always catch up tomorrow... But next thing you know, it's been two weeks and all you've been doing is reading news sites and looking at funny pictures, and your whole place looks like a dump.

All you really had to do was double click on that text editor and get coding... You could have finished a long time ago. But now you're starting to realize that you're gonna have to come up with excuses. You're the only person on the face of the Earth who can't seem to deliver things on time. You got lazy, and now you're late. Please feel guilty and disappear down the tubes of the internet.

It's not so different with personal projects such as these. You hype things up, code every day, let people know how things are going... Then one day you skip one of your weekly or monthly updates. You resurface a couple of months later and apologize to your rabid fans, with a promise of more frequent updates, only to end up giving no news at all. Just go to any hobbyist developer's website and look at the latest news. Chances are it's a blog post from last year that reads "No, we're not dead!" Psh. Most people probably think, "If it were me working on this, I wouldn't have quit like that." What they probably don't realize is that they might not even have lasted half as long as the average project.

This is really starting to sound pessimistic, so I might as well clear things up: no, I'm not giving up! I only opened the site 3 days ago! What I'm trying to say is that what I'm trying to do -- namely, develop a large game all by myself -- is not going to be easy. I'm in charge of the design, the programming, the art, the story, the soundtrack. I've been scribbling away in my notebook for a couple of months now. I've got a little bit of stuff coded.. But I'm far from having anything presentable. If I don't take some major steps to keep things well organized, I'll probably end up like most other projects... I'll stop working on the game for a couple of weeks, and then the code will start to "feel like a stranger;" so I'll open the IDE, look at the code, and when I realize I'm not sure how I should go about picking up where I left off, I'll probably close everything and do something else. And then, the project will be canceled. I don't want that to happen.

I've decided to make sure I take every precaution to remain properly organized and motivated. I'm making a timetable. It won't really be a timetable, more like a chronological to-do list, without deadlines that are impossible to meet. I need to write up a precise project description and cut it up into logical parts. The way I'm working now, I never know what to do first. Should I make some 3D models and textures? Should I write my terrain engine? Should I manually create my file formats and then create editors for them, or should I create the editors and engines first? I've already got almost everything written down, and yet, I don't really know what I'm doing.

This website will be my main source of motivation. I will focus on providing status updates as often as I can. I need to be able to post at least once a week and show substantial advances since the last update. It's important, for instance, to set specific goals each time I post and try to meet them. The shortest distance from A to B is a straight line, provided that you carefully study each hurdle. That's the philosophy I want to follow.

I'd better start now. Here's the current goal: Write a design document that takes all the main points from what I wrote in my notebook and summarizes them in a structured manner. This will be as formal as possible, starting with an abstract, a rough list of features, and then the "meat" of the game, which will list what needs to be done, cut up in "modules" with as little interdependencies as possible, so that I can isolate them and work on them one by one.

There's also a few things I need to do "IRL," lol. Like that 10 page book report for Tuesday. I got to pick the book, but I'm not done reading it yet. Didn't realize it was 500 pages. Hurr.

See you next post.

I'm making a game. It has spaceships and aliens. It's gonna be great.