Wow... Long time no talkie. It's kind of crazy it's been months since I've done an actual post... I've decided that I am going to take my little break at work this week to write a post on some of my activity.
I've spent a lot of time entrenching myself in game development since my last post. I have been somewhat venturing out on my own because I figure that anything I can learn on my own can also be applied to the greater team as a whole.
I've looked at a few different avenues for programming languauges, and I think they all have their place. Here are some of the ones I have been looking at:
I'm going to preface this next section by letting you know that I putzed around in all of these different languages because I am running an event at St. Norbert College that we have coined the "SNC Game Jam Lite". It's part of a makers event at the Mulva Library. Minor pitch here, it is going down on May 10, 2014 in the basement of the Mulva Library. More details on that later. Before moving on, LOGO SMACK
SNC Game Jam Lite Logo
All four of them are a decent choice depending on what you are trying to do. I have an older copy of Adobe CS4 that I can use for the Flash IDE, but it is horribly out-of-date. I also have no desire to pay for Adobe Creative Cloud. I really liked the tutorial that I used (see the link above). It was very easy to follow. I was able to learn one way of doing collision detection. Collision detection was very easy through the Flash IDE. You essentially setup a "hitbox" an detect whether or not an object that can damage the ship is within the hitbox. Very simple.
Using Flashdevelop was kind of cool too. It's much more developer oriented than the Flash IDE. It's pretty nice to still be able to program Actionscript without having to pay a monthly fee. The major downside to the whole thing is that Flashdevelop only works on Windows... LAME! Through the tutorial above, I was able to determine that I don't remeber enough trigonometry from high school. It sort of rekindled a passion to try to pick up some more math skills. Many of the actual programming tidbits from using the Flash IDE also applied to Flashdevelop. I just had to deliver things in a different way.
The Javascript method was very cool! I'm really liking it for more of my personal projects. As long as I have a web browser HTML5 compatible and I have a text editor I can program for that platform. It's interesting how the tutorial sets up Javascript to be an Object Oriented Programming (OOP for short) language. He also gets into QuadTrees, which are pretty cool. Once I'm done with the Game Jam you bet I'm going to be looking at that algorithm again.
This brings me to Scratch. Scratch is a very simple drag-and-drop programming interface on the surface, but underneath you have the power of MIT surging it forward. It can handle a lot of complex tasks, and it's pretty damn fun to use. This is what I decided on for the platform for the event. It can be simple enough for elementary school kids to use, but you can also get pretty complicated with the higher end users! It has built in collision detection, and you can get something up and running quickly. Even better, all concepts from before work in Scratch. You just have to understand the language! It's addicting, and I recommend anyone reading this give it a try. I especially recommend it for anyone wanting to get their children into development.
So far in my journey, I have found that regardless of language, you can adapt what you want to do to a bunch of environments. While it helps to be proficient in one, you need to be open to learn something new. Technologies change and things improve. If you train yourself in the theory and just look at things as solving a problem, you will set yourself up for a brighter future than if you just get stuck in your old ways. Don't put blinders on. Understand that the language and the development you are developing in is just a tool. The tool is not as important as your brain. Always hunger to learn more. Always understand what your goal is. Always, keep moving forward.
Walls are only obstacles
- Boris
