Thursday, November 15, 2012

I’ve stayed true, in a way, to my stance on charity runs because my registration fee will be the only thing attending in my stead this weekend. My other pledge–to create more–is an entirely different matter. I’ve made good on it. I’ve made good on it in spades, and I haven’t even started the project I mentioned.

There is a creative element to this blog, but it’s not enough. I’ve been doing this for a while now, mainly to preserve a baseline of mental acuity, and I’ll be the first to admit there’s something slightly disingenuous about it. Some weeks–hopefully not this week, of course–it’s, like, “All right! Time to hit the keyboard and shit out two posts.” Well, I have shat out two posts this week, so check. I’ve also been making a game.

Let me be clear. I’m not doing any of the actual development, nor would anybody want me to do so. I submit to you my coding credentials: the dubious honor of being one of two students to get an “F” on the midterm in Intro to Computer Science. Couldn’t even swing a C++, you could say. But what began as an entrant in a 48-hour jam submission has found some legs, and we’ll be submitting the next iteration to another competition in two weeks.

Development’s the meat of the workflow, make no mistake, and while the tasks I’ve picked up–map design, tweaking, QA, writing–lack the glamour, I find them fascinating, particularly the first two. My gaming vocabulary is rich, as you know, from decades of consumption, and being able to draw upon that to build something is thrilling. I like thinking about the texture, the feel of games, and when a hunch proves right, a feature clicks, and it’s just plain fun, there’s nothing quite like it. Time disappears–and it’s exactly what the doctor ordered.