Watching the little gamedev twitter world, I find notch working on Minecraft and releasing 1.8, Chevy Ray is enthusiastically developing a new game with a bunch of artists, John Carmack like usual mumbling about weird things related to displays and refresh rates, I think he’s creating an intergalactic space ship out of old CRT monitors or something.. whatever it may be, it can probably reach escape velocity..
IndieCade independent games festival is announcing it’s finalists! http://www.indiecade.com/index.php/2011/Finalists/ then accusing notch of causing their website to go down hehe notch is like a living breathing DoS attack
And Terry Cavanagh celebrating because his game “At a distance” is a finalist at indiecrade!
And I’m coding my own little thing, I couldn’t help but smile =) I like this little world, and I want to stay in it..
It might be getting old, but I will again mention that participating in Ludum Dare was the best decision I made this year, I urge all game developers interested in the skill of making actual games (rather than just talking about it or making cute main menus -I did both hehe-) to try it and work hard at succeeding, the moment you succeed in finishing fun games within 48 hours,.. the results will surely send shockwaves into your future.. it’s such a pure concentrated experience in gamedev, it’s just beautiful.
Hi! This is the first day of Ramadan ending holiday, so happy eid!!! :D
After Prison Escapor, I had to come to Alexandria for the holiday submitting to my family’s demands, and at the same time I was interested in visiting a place in Alexandria (Egypt) called IdeasGym which is a wonderful project that concentrates on after-school activities for kids of ages starting from around 6 years up to 18 years.
If I spend three days every week like I spent the last three days weird things will happen.. I’ve learned so much and I needed those lessons so bad, while I’m at it I finished my first flash game and the first game I design from scratch! and it only took 3 days.. Prison: Escapor.
LD#21 was wonderful, nearly 600 games were submitted, and I felt like I’m competing head-to-head in a race with so many great game developers from all around the world, some just starting, some with 10+ years of experience, some own game companies, and some are considered legends in game development/design.
I’m exceptionally happy with how the timetable turned out to be much more suitable to me compared to the first one, I have been sleeping from 12-8 for about a week now. I managed to keep the timetable going in Alexandria.
Eventually though I started to get seriously frustrated with how slow working on the netbook was. I mean everytime I built the swf file as debug I’m forced to wait for 5+ minutes while the Netbook nearly hangs with all resources nearing 100% (RAM and two CPU cores!), by the last day I would take a break every single time I wanted to test the swf, that was not cool. But I’m back to my working PC now :)
Fantastic! I managed to keep a timetable this time.. yesterday was mostly spent on the way between Cairo and Alexandria, I met a new friend from south korea on board the train, had fun time with the cultural exchange, and got directions to a few korean restaurants in Maadi which serve Kimchi :)
Second day, today, I worked about 10 hours, I can say I really did work for about 7 hours of them? which is still pretty good, working on my Netbook usually goes well from a performance point of view but this time things were a little extra slow and extra unresponsive, turns out I’m out of ram! even though 1GB should be very sufficient for the apps I’m using, something was not right…
Yesterday, I didn’t have internet, I sat down and analyzed what was bad about draft 1 timetable. The things I came up with are as follows:
It was too restrictive and quite inflexible. Everything depends on how strict I followed the timetable
It didn’t feel like I have a choice for the whole day
Some days I have an errand or two which would happen at a random time, sometimes there is an event or a party that I want to go to, either of these would throw the whole timetable off
There are so many different things to do every week, it causes a bit of confusion, and takes time from the higher priority things.
The only advantage of draft 1 timetable, is the balance between creativity and work. Which I admit felt really good, work is stressing, creativity is letting go. But I’m gonna try not to do that this time.
The timetable experiment was not a big success, maybe only a small one?.. But I think it helps me gauge my time better, I’m now thinking what to do next. Boy this is going to be a long post.
Fact is, I’m a very ambitious man, there is so much I want to do, experience, and master, it may take me my whole lifetime to go through just the major stuff. So now, I’m questioning my tendency to do everything and not abandon any of my interests no matter how silly, which seriously impacts the bigger goals I have.
I think the reason for this tendency is that when I learn and build experience with something for sometime, say 6 months. Then not work on it for a year. Then trying to go back to doing something with it, I discover it’s as if I never really learned and experienced it. This is really frustrating for me, it feels like I lost all those months and now I need to lose more months and put more effort into getting it all back.
Today was, am… not work day, I didn’t even look at the timetable.. shame on me. I’ll write a post-mortem tomorrow detailing my next step.
I spent the day researching the american constellation space program that Obama terminated (I blame Microsoft) which involved going back to the moon by 2030 using our new technology. It’s embarrassing that human space equipment in operation now are mostly 50s and 60s technology, very outdated. Alas, it has been canceled even though it entered the final stages of development.
Today started with a beautiful TED talk about trying something new for 30 days, I was pumped with excitement! :D
I’m a bit out of energy today for some unknown reason, I don’t remember the specific details of what I did during the first 8 hours! but it involved playing guitar from written musical notes for the first time, I got carried away with the practice and spent nearly 3 hours plucking the strings, my fingers hurt a little and I didn’t feel them by the end of the practice but I could have carried on for 3 more hours. Maybe it’s that TED speech?