Day er..um... 40ish:
Well the new release of the TGE (formerly T2D) engine beta 2.0 I decided to put the project on hold. The engine no longer has enough documentation for a newbie to figure things out since the examples no longer work. The upside is that the tools that are in progress promise to be really great once the entire thing gets stable.
So Its been Oblivion and Second Life to the rescue.

Day 21: For love of free time...
After making a bunch of bouncing balls do all sorts of strange things, I've decided that I don't understand how things like collisions work in the engine. So I'm going through whatever tutorials I can find. Unfortunately that's not a whole lot, and most of them almost work. Not that There has been a bunch of free time floating around lately. Speaking of which.. Galactic Civilizations II is splendidly perfect and the promise of future tweaks has me hooked for the long term I think. But I've never actually finished a game.. Maybe I need to play on smaller galaxies but I get bored before I win.
Oh and Guitar Hero for the PS2.. Very Very Very entertaining and playable in Small candy sized intervals.
Anyway MassageBuilder.com is having our marketing push in full swing so that keeps us busy.

Day 8: Impressive amounts of lack of progress
Well real life at massagebuilder.com has been keeping me busy with our first national marketing push to massage therapists nationwide and latest iteration of web tools for their practices.
I did manage to write an actual application (instead of the usual web application) which was a nice change of pace. Unfortunately all the real work has been doing a good job at keeping me away from getting much done on the prototype.

I managed to get the basic board laid out with placeholder graphics (colored circles) I also got the basics of the initial motion started. However dealing with the collisions caused all sorts of issues that I have not had time to work on yet.

Also the evil geniuses at Stardock have released the oh so free time hungry Galactic Civilizations II and I'll admit as to having played that when I should have been prototyping (and not regretting a moment spent with GalCivII).

I gave up EQ2 since the main reason I play the MMOs is to play with the wife and it ran like crap on her PC (probably because she's only got 512mb ram) And I re-installed COH which has apparently gotten some nice graphical tweaks and lots of new content. Now I just need to get the wife hooked (which considering the amount of kibbitzing going on during costume design should not be that hard)

And the impending arrival of Oblivion does not bode well for free time development either.

Currently I'm re-reading the Tad Williams' "Otherland" series in small bites over the last couple weeks. It's actually better than I remember. Tom Wolfe's "I am Charlotte Simmons" was a good read as well.
Picked up Stephenson's first part of the Baroque Cycle but am having a hard time getting into it.

Day 1: Well it's about time I got this started.. I've been hashing out a game I want to make in my head for a while now. Finally, I'm getting ready to do something about it.
The Stars are aligned. The moon is pregnant with possibilities and I've got a full 12pack in the fridge.
This is going to be my little Place where I'm going to vent and rant and share my findings as I figure out how to make a game for the pc.
What's been decided so far:

• 2d or 3d : Well the thought of making a fully 3d game is nice. There's just me. 3D adds a whole Lot of more work. So this first game is going to be 2-D, that's not saying I won't be using pre-rendered images for the sprites.
• Game mechanics: Well I've been refining them in my head for a while. I've done some pseudo playtesting in photoshop(well scribbles is more like what it turned out looking like) But it is going to be a variation of the match 3 gameplay. But I've got some twists that I've never seen implemented before... so It's going to be interesting how it turns out.
• Target Size: Ideally this is going to be a downloadable game, so a 5-12 meg demo version and the full version weighing in at around 25-30meg, I've also tossed around the idea of publishing a Deluxe CD version with videos etc etc through Lulu.com But first things first. eh?
• Game Engine: well this came down to a) create one from scratch b)find a free one c)use a commercial engine. I looked at what it takes to create DirectX programming from scratch and decided that was more than I'm willing to bite off. I looked a all the free engines I could find online... And there were a LOT of incomplete ones, and a lot of broken ones. Python and Pygame were nice though, but it felt a bit sluggish, Popcap's framework looked robust but I'm really just not that fond of java. So eventually I looked at gamemaker, blitz, a couple others, and then I got an email from GarageGames.com announcing the Torque 2D engine early adopters beta. After taking a look at the demos and reading about it around the web It looks like it was the perfect fit for what I want to do. Oh and an extra bonus.. It'll compile out to Mac as well as PC, thats nice.
• Title: Well I've got a couple ideas but the overall theme of the game is currently up in the air as well, I know what I would LIKE to do, but We'll see how much time and effort its going to take.

I've worked through the basic tutorials and am coming to grips with the engine, its scripting language is definatly a different mindset when compared to the C#, javascript, PHP & perl I usually use.

Next up: Creating a quick mockup of basic gameplay to validate the design and guide the interface design.

Ever notice that it gets harder and harder to stay motivated when you're further and further ahead of schedule.. It's like there is a little voice that says 'it's ok to slow down, c'mon you're ahead of schedule..' even though you know that chances are that you're going to need all the time you have just to finish everything on schedule..

It's thursday, and I'm tired. Finished watching the tivo'd Battlestar Galactica episodes yesterday. Great show. I hope it does well. Wish I had something more interesting to say but I'm working on some marketing copy. It's a new experience but I'd like to think my writing muscles have gained some newfound strength as a result. Now if I could just get rid of the dirty feeling I get from trying to organize marketing babble. *shiver*

-games-

Part of me really wants be able to enjoy EverQuest2 but my lack of extended periods of free time I'm just not able to get into it. On the other hand, the guys at Cornered Rat have made World War II Online into a beautiful compelling game experiencem after a couple years futher development. I have actually resubscribed after this last free trial weekend and really enjoy the ability to play shortish 30min-1hr sessions and feel like making difference in the world.

Other than that the inital 2005 gaming outlook looks mediocre so far. I cant think of more than 2 or 3 titles that make it to the 'must buy' catagory. Off the top of my head those would be, Black and White 2, Battlefield 2, and Stronghold 2. Notice a trend? Maybe if lionhead finished 'the movies' it'll be worth picking up if for no other reason to play with some Machinema. Well hopefully the industry Hype Machine(tm) will bring something original to the limelight, and if we're really lucky it won't suck.