pixelracket

It’s one thing, of course, to declare that you’re going to build a game; it’s quite another to do it. Part of the difficulty for me has been in the choice of computer language to use for the whole process.

Purists will scream “C!” (or at least in my fevered imaginings they do) or “C++!”.  The draw of C is that it is a simple and powerful language; a fundamental fact about the language that you would never be able to divine if your first experience was with the heavily-corrupted, bastard stepchild of that language known as C++.  Maybe someday I will rant coherently about C++ and lay out each argument in a methodical and socially-approved way, but it’s hard to do so when you’re foaming with wrath at the very thought.  Suffice it to say that C++ obfuscates your code too much–with template classes, structures that are classes and yet not, multiple inheritance, operators that sometimes do one thing in one context and something completely different in another context…!

I’d better stop.

But  have you ever tried to read the C++ code that someone else has written?  Or even code that you wrote last year and left behind when you moved to another project?  You must comment profusely when programming in C++; ideally with five lines of comment for every line of code in order to make sense of any of it.

So, C++ is out.

It occurs to me that I’ve no desire to continue working at my present job forever.  It’s likely that the same thought occurs to everyone, eventually — or maybe not.  But I know that I enjoy making my computer do things more than I enjoy this job, and so it occurs to me that I can write a game.  (Well, any software, really; but a game also tells a story, which is the second-best thing I like to do).

While I would like to write the next World of Warcraft, it seems best to start with something a little more realistic.  To that end, I’ve resolved to write something that I hope will be half as successful as Braid, and in the same vein; by which I mean, it will be a two-dimensional side-scrolling game with beautiful artwork and (hopefully) compelling game play.

This blog will chronicle my efforts in that direction.  While perhaps you will find something useful here, in the code or ideas that are posted, I am also posting this for myself — it is my way of keeping track of the fact that yes, I am making progress even when it doesn’t feel like it.