April 10, 2010

Widening the horizon

This is a game making site but where are the games? What gives?

I've been slightly less motivated in making games lately and I've been doing different things, just to get my ideas and my motivation up. As I said in an earlier post I wanted a break from Experimental Games and I want to spend more time on each game just to get the quality of the games up.

Lately I've been using vim and I really like it but the learning curve is really high, so why not make a game about it? To make the learning progress easier and hopefully even somewhat fun. I haven't come up with a great idea yet, and thus I haven't started, but I'm pretty optimistic.

I also mentioned Ludum Dare but as the looks of things it ain't gonna happen this time. I've got a massage course the whole weekend timed on just as the 48 hour game making competition is and I don't think I wanna stress myself to manage the both of them.

Instead for a game I've been focusing on learning Haskell and on improving this site. Trying out different stuff like trying a new paradigm and trying out different languages is a really good way of Sharpening your Saw. Yes technically he meant doing things not related to programming, such as math, but I still see it as doing something completely different and improving while doing that.

For example Kohana, the framework this site is built on, has made me think more about tools and frameworks instead of just language features as it transformed my awful, hackish site into this beautiful little thing literally in the blink of an eye. Or take jQuery which took my epic cross-browser checks and transformed it into beautiful code. These two seemingly small changes made the boring web developer process really fun!

Yeah that's what I've been doing; I've been widening my horizon and I've been having fun at the process! Wooo