Digital Cream

I’ve been playing BioShock on the 360 for a few weeks now, often in the evenings when my brain is too puddly to code but not ready for sleep. My son Dylan has been watching me and he has been playing it himself. I will likely write a few posts about it. In this post I want to extol the game’s overall mood of imposing, sinister breakdown and corruption. I was a great admirer of its ancestor System Shock which had a similar mood. (continued »)

I have been digging deep into programming my own little weird games, writing ActionScript 3 code fulltime. I have a very long way to go but I am immensely relieved to discover that I am decently skilled at object-oriented programming. For a while there I was not sure if I had the mental chops to grok it. I don’t think I’ve ever more enjoyed any creative act (other than the nekkid kind) more than I enjoy programming. (continued »)

I am really enjoying wrapping my head around OOP practices. I’m getting much deeper into coding than I thought I would. It’s a tremendously satisfying mental challenge. It also will allow me to make my own weird little games to a greater degree than I had guessed.

I am doing my best imitation of a real coder nowadays. I am programming in Flash, making a proof of concept of my new game project here at Auran. I have really made progress so now instead of making awful code I am making bad code. What I am making may or may not be able to be cleaned up and reused by a real engineer, but even if it’s not, it serves as a companion to the spec I am writing to illustrate what I intend the final app to be like.

Flash is a fantastic tool and I am really enjoying working with it. I am able to refine my design rapidly without bothering anyone with changes except for me. I can get an idea, whack it down, and then see if it works. If not, no worries. I like programming so I’m happy either way.

I will have a team eventually, once the budget has anything to spare around here, but meanwhile I am happy as a clam.