Still Alive
No, I have not disappeared from the face of the earth. I have been doing my thing as usual, working day and night on my project. Today, though, I had to take the day off. My wife had a colonoscopy in the morning and I had to take care of the girls for basically the whole day. The procedure was not too bad in itself, but the preparation the day before was actually pretty scary. To completely clean your stomach and intestines they make you drink four liters of a really nasty liquid medicine. I will not describe the entire process, but you can imagine how so not fun the whole thing is. (Sorry Baby, but I am a blogger now. I will embarrass you like this once in a while.) Her doctor wanted to rule out the possibility of colon cancer, and luckily that was the outcome. We were a little nervous for a moment there. At least for now the only drama in the family revolves around the unemployed father who just does not seem to be in any hurry to find a job. Hopefully that one will have a happy ending too.

And what exactly am I doing now? The plan is to focus on finishing an actual mini-game. It does not have to look fantastic and use absolutely every game programming technique that I have learned during these weeks, but it has to be complete. I believe a finished product will be more useful in helping me find a job in a game company than a bunch of disconnected little experiments. Once it is complete, I will send out the resumes. While I wait in agony for the inevitable rejection notes and possible interviews, I will try to add the cool stuff that I would rather be working on right now. Such is life. Finishing projects is an art in itself. And for many people interested in game development, it is a rather boring one. If you search the internet for games made by hobbyists, you usually find hundreds of them abandoned after a furious initial effort and very few seen to the end. I MUST make sure that this does not happen to me. But part of that involves some not very glamorous tasks. I took all the demo code, which was based in a sample program that came with the graphics library I am using (Ogre3D), and reassembled it in a more polished form that I can actually show to people without shame. You can now click on the "Browse the source code" link on the right and take a peek if you feel like it (but I know you don't, of course). The project now has a name: "Hunter", and is now hosted in sourceforge.net. Sourceforge is a free hosting service for open source projects that provides you with a number of useful tools and web space for your project. My hope is that the project will continue even when my quest is done. I will either get a game programming job and be happy and satisfied and somebody else can use it to get started in their own game, or I will not make it and continue to work on it as a hobby while I spend my days toiling away generating useless reports. Preparing the project page will also consume a bunch of my time. So much to do...

I did spend about a week becoming an entry level 3d artist. The game will need a few animated characters and I have nobody to help me with it. Plus it is fun. You should try it one day! Hopefully you will have money to buy a decent 3D modeling program, unlike me. I love Blender3D, the free program I am using. It is very powerful, but was written all backwards. Learning to use it is like training with a kung fu master who will occassionally punch you in the ribs so you do not forget what pain really means. I even brought my laptop and brand new pen tablet with me to jury duty. People even asked me about it. I got to pretend to be a 3D artist for a day. I was cool!

The next version of the demo, I mean, of the Hunter game, will be out soon. It will mostly look to you like the last one plus a few menus. But, ah, all the sweat and tears that went into learning to make those. It is a bit discouraging sometimes the amount of effort that goes into programming things that do not look like much. Computers are so dumb.