GameDevMike

I’ve been out of action for the past week on all fronts. A couple of sudden changes conspired to pull me in a new direction. First, one of my dogs passed away on Oct 30. That sapped me of the motivation to do anything productive for a couple of days. My wife took it quite a bit harder than I did, so I spent much of the first two days consoling her and trying to keep her spirits up. Subsequently, I wasn’t much in the mood to spend hours on end at the computer.

Then I started getting stir crazy. I fired up Eclipse a few times in the intervening days, but each time I closed it after staring at the screen for several minutes. What little time I’ve spent at the keyboard I’ve used to mindlessly play Unreal Tournament 2004. Much more of my time has been directed toward wandering around the city, visiting some places I hadn’t been in a while, seeing a few old friends, and generally enjoying the blissfully cool weather. It’s all been quite refreshing, since for a long while I hadn’t been out about town near as often as I used to be. It’s something I intend to make a habit.

I’m gradually getting back into my groove, though I certainly won’t be at my desk near as much as before. I’m going to increase the number of days I spend in the gym each week, get back into hiking up some of the local mountains two or three times a week, and try to take a day or two each week to meet a friend. Spending 14+ hours each day at the computer, in between my English classes, just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

Ultimately, I suspect this will all actually make me more productive. I mean, theoretically, since I’ll be spending less time at the computer I’ll need to be more focused when I am there. I won’t have time for mindless distractions like surfing reddit, or browsing through the GameDev.net forums every few hours. Activities like that can sap two or three hours before I realize it.

I’ve decided not to attend the KGC2007 this week, after all, so I won’t be posting any pictures or session summaries. However, I do hope to be able to post some screenies of my progress on the game in the not too distant future. When I dropped everything last week, I was getting much closer to a point where I can actually have something reasonably coherent on the screen. I hate posting screenshots of early development, since most builds are just feature tests hacked together to make sure that the system I just added works as intended. I’ve still got a little bit more plumbing to do, but next week I plan to start working on a simple in-game map editor. When that is in a workable state I’ll post some shots.