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Plan for Brian Jones

Name:	Brian Jones
Date Posted:	Nov 06, 2005
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Sapporo, Japan - Life - All That Jazz

Time moves forward, plans change, I still have no clue what I want to do when I grow up. Sapporo is awesome, and slowly but surely my Japanese is improving. On the side I am working on writing a nano-novel, still trying to complete the GeekSys workorder/inventory system, and working in my studies and fun where I can.

I'm one of those people that continues to try and juggle his 10 different interests, and has a hard time completing projects until enough momentum has been built up to carry things through. I've begun to realize that I lack passion, focus, and determination right now, which is rather frustrating. I keep staring at the t3d and t2d code bases wasting away on my harddrive, and telling myself "THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO FINALLY TRY AND DO IT, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?"

Recent Blog Posts

List:	11/15/06 - Historical Quotes 08/26/06 - Fractal World Generation 07/25/06 - Python, Finals, Future 06/25/06 - Mind Facet (web software) 06/13/06 - Life without a Plan 01/10/06 - Level Based For Profit Open Source 11/06/05 - Plan for Brian Jones 10/14/05 - Plan for Brian Jones

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abc (Nov 06, 2005 at 08:03 GMT)

The trick, at least for me, was in finding out that it's not a matter of sitting and staring at the code, or the reference manual. Doing that helps me think about what I might be able to do next, and the experience gained makes the process much more fluid, but for actually going forward on a voluntary project I have to have some "catalyst" that will move me. If my skill were infinite I would just choose any idea and hack away, but it's not. To be able to reach my goals, I have to keep finding ways to push it out,

When I was first getting used to programming a 2d engine from scratch - or using Pygame, that is - I went through about five or six different approaches to the problem of showing and controlling tiles and sprites over as many months, and that turned out to be very valuable in making me think more about what makes a game difficult to develop; I tried simple, naive approaches, and more complex and abstracted ones, and ones aiming for performance or a certain model for how events would work. (one of them did this thing where every map was running at the same time and you could control a "camera" to view different maps at any moment, and similarly, warp the player around between them - I'll have to try going back to that idea sometime) Between that and several GID(or longer) events such as Ludum Dare, I got a lot more used to doing game programming - or the kind of specific game programming that I was interested in designing for, and that was the key to really getting the ball rolling. Until I found that starting point, I was lost thinking "it would be nice if...."

Chris Labombard (Nov 07, 2005 at 14:11 GMT)

lol

The comment is bigger then the .plan :)

Unsung Zero (Nov 07, 2005 at 18:30 GMT)

Juggling 10 interests at once... I think that I'd have to put a check in that box too.

If you'd like to learn some Japanese rather easily, checkout pimsleur's japanese. It's about 90 very helpful audio lessons.
Edited on Nov 07, 2005 18:31 GMT

Brian Jones (Nov 08, 2005 at 07:59 GMT)

@James: Thanks for the input. Finding the right starting point is definately the key, I'm just trying to find the time to get the ball rolling as you say. Consulting project, learning at a foreign University, doing a rather large project on A.I. as an independent study project (for less credit than it is worth, bleh), and having that strong once-every-3-month desire to hammer out a game. I WILL find it, haha...

@Unsung: I am actually studying the language as my major. I am in Japan now, studying at a Japanese University. Thanks for the suggestion though.

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