Plan for Eric Roberts

Life as an engineering student and game development crawl

Since my last plan about Android Arena a lot has and has not got done with the project.

Ever since that plan way back in August, school has started and it has pretty much consumed my every waking hour. I'm currently enrolled in my 2nd year of Electrical and Computer Engineering and I'm convinced that life outside of school wasn't taking into account when they developed the program.

Oh it's there - it's just really hard to get.

I thought that Computer Engineering would broaden my skills with computers in general and help me make better games. I didn't want to go into Computer Science because I don't know if I could stand doing software related work for school - then have my hobby of (mainly) coding my game. Was it a good choice?

Yes and No.

Yes because:

1. Engineering teaches methods of project management, working in teams, design, communication - methods even software specific.
2. I have broadened my knowledge in computers and electronics - and it looks like it won't stop for a while.
3. I'm learning a lot, and I'll have a large amount of career options after my degree.

No because:

1. I'm not sure if I really want to know as much about electronics as I do. A lot of it seems only useful to me if I were to do it for a job. A $3000 development board for developing chips may or may not be something I would like to invest in to do at home as a hobby.
2. No life outside of school - not really anyway.
3. Very little time for my game.

That last point has really annoyed me. Every weekend, like this one I always hope to get a good chunk of my game done. At least put in a few hours. Get something done - and finally update my .plan after months of nothingness because of school. Every weekend has come and gone, every weekend without being able to spend a single moment on my game. Usually my weekends are spent studying for upcoming "10% quizzes" or a lab preperation that will literally take me the entire day - every other week I get two of them.

I get more done on my game during the week when I feel I've caught up enough to work on my game for a little while.
Most people think it's unnatural to be able to stand doing this for such a long period of time, but the truth is, you really do get caught up in the work.

This weekend is different however, I have time to update my .plan - I get an extra hour ;).

And I finally I purchased the lighting pack (3 weeks ago or so) as a birthday present for myself... twice. Apparently the site wouldn't take my "invalid" credit card number after about 5 attempts. Finally it suddenly worked after having having verfied it was entered correctly twice each time. I don't know how it happened - maybe I was just excited to get the thing to order, but somehow I ended up with two licenses instead of one. I didn't realize this until I got the bill and it was much bigger than I had expected. That's when I checked my account to find "2" orders of the license. Not the greatest piece of news. I've contacted GG last week and hopefully they'll get to me by this week.

So what does that mean for the game?
During class, or during my commute to and from school I usually spend a great deal of time thinking about implementation details with the game. It's got to the point where I feel as though I've got a great deal done in my head - it's just not actually done.
At least the lighting pack has been installed.

But to end on a good note, I finally feel as though the learning curve to Torque has suddenly dropped from "nearly impossible to understand how to use", to a nice "you can do nearly anything - it's just going to take some time and effort".

The game is in my sights.

- Eric