Re: Site updates August 13th
4am after work, so expect some rambling as I try to stay awake. Hehe.
I'm with Dark here. While your plan might work (I stress "might"), you have been envisioning grand plans for both of those games for a long long time, and it would be very difficult to create super simple games bearing those titles. The temptation would be to, just add 1 of the features you've thought about for years. Now 1 more, and 1 more. Pretty soon you're back to working on a larger scale project that gets hung up again. The titles Mysteries of the Ancients, and USA Raceway carry a lot of designers baggage, that you wouldn't have if you started on something new.
Your post talked about the ups and downs as you switched languages and searched for the right API to build with, and this really makes me want to bring up my own phil osophy for making games. For many years I have been saying this to people looking to develop a game. Build the game with what you already know. When you decide to create a game, that is not the time to try to learn something new. While planning out a game you wish to create, plan out its construction using only the things you can already do (and do well). If you have no idea how to handle multiplayer (just an example), then don't plan out making a multiplayer game. If you have no idea how to add fancy echoing effects to your sounds, then don't include that as part of the game you're wanting to make. If we violate this rule, we can all sit and imagine the most amazing mind-blowing game that could ever exist. Anyone could! Holding an imagined game concept in your mind doesn't count for anything... what matters is what will actually exist.
By limiting yourself to only what you currently know, you never have to go looking for new sound libraries or languages to make a game work. If the sound library you are using at this moment won't be supported down the road, who cares? Use it anyway, because you know how to use it, it is already right here in front of you, and it does what it is supposed to do. Build the games of "next year", next year, not today. Chasing what Will be cutting edge tomorrow is a losing battle.
When you want to learn some new coding thingy, do it simply for the joy of learning something new, with no actual need for it. Later when starting on a new project you will have this new knowledge to use in the design, but when done in this order everything flows nicely.
This is an approach to game design that you have very much disagreed with in the past, but it seems like a good time to at least run it past you again. Lots of people have thought I was crazy for doing things this way, but it results in insanely fas
t development times. I never get hung up trying to figure out how in the world I'll make feature X work, because if I didn't already know, I wouldn't have had it in my project plan. The progression of my games here in the audiogames world has followed this design philosophy, even if it meant some of my earlier titles were a bit clunky. When I had no idea how to make a screen reader read text, I just self voiced stuff. Before I knew how to pan sounds (in my sighted games I never really used sound) I just made games that had no need for sound panning. Same for adjusting sound volumes. When I didn't know how to add JAWS support, screw Jaws, my games just didn't support it. When I was between games I would experiment, do a little reading, and figure out new stuff I could use down the road. The main point is, building with only what you know may stop you from ever building those next-generation mind melting games, b
ut for good reason, so you don't follow that siren's call... luring programmers to their death.
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