He's so ambitious, he even sews...
So, it's no secret, Jer and I have a lot of time on our hands. I mean, and obscenely ridiculous number of hours to devote to doing whatever we think will educate, alleviate, or just flat out entertain ourselves. We should be spending these hours driving around and mailing off resumes, but where's the fun in that?
Heh, actually, the reason I'm not looking for a job with more vigor is that I feel that my brain's become somewhat slushy after 7 months out of college. I haven't programmed anything more complicated than a calculator since then, and my self confidence about heading out into the software work force is at an all time low. So, Jer came up with a nice fix to this dilemma: self-education. We picked up a couple books at Barnes and Noble last Wednesday to find out some more about C# and XML (a couple interesting programming tidbits that they never bothered to show us in college), and we've been studying ever since.
This all can naturally get pretty dull pretty quick, so in order to keep ourselves interested we're thinking about programming a game once we're comfortable with the new languages. Ideally we should probably shoot for some little action puzzler game, like Tetris or Luxor. These kinda games aren't too creatively demanding, provide a lot of bang for their source-code buck, and are generally enjoyable and addictive. However, at the moment we're a little bit more ambitious than that. We're contemplating making a Role Playing Game, like Final Fantasy or my first RPG Exile, with emphasis on story telling and character relationships. This is a much... much bigger programming challenge, as well as a creative escapade. Just making the game visually appealing is a task far beyond anything I was ever able to achieve in college. I've been contemplating using DivX to render the world map and towns in 3D, but I fear my programming eyes may be a bit larger than my artistic stomach there. Aside from the fact that I still don't know too much about DivX programming (I've only worked with OpenGL for 3D), in order to develop decent looking textures for a 3D environment I'd have to invite a better graphic designer than me into the mix... anyone interested?
If that weren't enough, we are also considering cloning the enjoyable Blades of Exile game by providing a game editor as well. This will make it possible for someone with no programming background to create a scenario in the RPG world we create, with the ability to design their own characters, towns, and situations. Such a game editor would be a boon to our own programming efforts, allowing the last phase of our development to be focused on scenario design instead of game mechanics. However, making this editor robust and safe poses far more problems than I could enumerate here. It's a really daunting task, but I think it would be a lot of fun if we can pull it off. If any of you programming folks have some advice you're willing to share, I am more than receptive to it.
Hmm... since I did put this all behind an lj-cut I kinda feel I should have a picture in here somewhere... here's a bunny with a pancake on his head:
Heh, actually, the reason I'm not looking for a job with more vigor is that I feel that my brain's become somewhat slushy after 7 months out of college. I haven't programmed anything more complicated than a calculator since then, and my self confidence about heading out into the software work force is at an all time low. So, Jer came up with a nice fix to this dilemma: self-education. We picked up a couple books at Barnes and Noble last Wednesday to find out some more about C# and XML (a couple interesting programming tidbits that they never bothered to show us in college), and we've been studying ever since.
This all can naturally get pretty dull pretty quick, so in order to keep ourselves interested we're thinking about programming a game once we're comfortable with the new languages. Ideally we should probably shoot for some little action puzzler game, like Tetris or Luxor. These kinda games aren't too creatively demanding, provide a lot of bang for their source-code buck, and are generally enjoyable and addictive. However, at the moment we're a little bit more ambitious than that. We're contemplating making a Role Playing Game, like Final Fantasy or my first RPG Exile, with emphasis on story telling and character relationships. This is a much... much bigger programming challenge, as well as a creative escapade. Just making the game visually appealing is a task far beyond anything I was ever able to achieve in college. I've been contemplating using DivX to render the world map and towns in 3D, but I fear my programming eyes may be a bit larger than my artistic stomach there. Aside from the fact that I still don't know too much about DivX programming (I've only worked with OpenGL for 3D), in order to develop decent looking textures for a 3D environment I'd have to invite a better graphic designer than me into the mix... anyone interested?
If that weren't enough, we are also considering cloning the enjoyable Blades of Exile game by providing a game editor as well. This will make it possible for someone with no programming background to create a scenario in the RPG world we create, with the ability to design their own characters, towns, and situations. Such a game editor would be a boon to our own programming efforts, allowing the last phase of our development to be focused on scenario design instead of game mechanics. However, making this editor robust and safe poses far more problems than I could enumerate here. It's a really daunting task, but I think it would be a lot of fun if we can pull it off. If any of you programming folks have some advice you're willing to share, I am more than receptive to it.
Hmm... since I did put this all behind an lj-cut I kinda feel I should have a picture in here somewhere... here's a bunny with a pancake on his head: