Excuse me if this gets kinda live-journalie
I'm a few years behind all you brilliant mother fuckers, but I just started getting back into gamedev. I've always had a halting, kinda shitty relationship with it, even though game design is basically what I've wanted to do with all 30 years of my life. I started this year by applying to NYU's gamecenter for an MFA in gamedesign.
After a hellacious 2 weeks to get the application in, I decided to get to work and start desinging a damn game. I have a tendency to put up a bunch of barriers to myself "Ohh, make a game, well you HAVE to do it C, and you have to teach yourself C, and directX and windows programming!" and then I get partway in, get bored of doing non game related things, and walk away. Back in college, I took on a project to build a game, did the same thing, worked long hours, had a shitty result, I think that's a big reason why I didn't pursue it farther. The farthest I've gotten since then was a basic tetris clone in XNA.
So last weekend I decided I'd take a different track, and reduce my barriers to entry, keep it simple, an get right into the game making, less with the other shit. I downloaded Love2D and started tinkering. I've never used Lua, so I thought I was doing it to myself again for a moment, but Lua is easy as shit, it's basically javascript with more syntactic wonk, and less architecture wonk.
I'm only a few hours in so far, but I've made a ton of progress, and I"m really enjoying it. I've got a unified coordinate system for collisions, and then translations to render it. Some really basic movement stuff, and more. Love is a nice little thing for prototyping games, or building something simple.
So I came back full circle, and I'm going back and trying to remake that game I tried to make in college and fell flat on my face doing. My idea is to look at a sports game as an RTS, with very limited direct control of your players. I'm focusing on Ultimate Frisbee, my sport of choice.
Right now the plan is over the next couple of months to take it in stages. First stage is basic game up and running, all graphics are primitives, 3 players on a side moving around with basic pathing, collision and interactions. The frisbee will have really simple phyiscs. Add in a bunch of debug options and tools.
Stage two will be to improve interactivitity, work on some ideas I have to make the "Sports game seen through RTS tropes" work. make the opposing AI interesting to play against, make disc physics realistic etc.
Stage 3 will be visuals, move to sprits, animations, flare etc. Add a few different traditional ultimate plays.
At this point, I'll stop, and see if it's fun. If this idea works I'll keep expanding on it, maybe port it out of LUA, and try to jump to 3D, but that's at least 4-6 months away. First step, just make something fun, and something I'm proud of.
Right now though, it's good, I can see progress every time I put some work in, and that makes me happy, and I"m getting a good hour in every night, I hope to maintain that.
