Constitutional

A short break

I think I've done a good amount. I've learned some things about GBS, drawing, and personal limits. I've started a twine for one set of conversations so I can figure out the branching and topic marking. I'm setting up to develop the binary sub-system to track all the story points and conversations (though it needs a bit more story-boarding... white-boarding? not brain-storming, but troubleshooting and that other thing. Some -ing word.)

I guess now I'm asking for feedback. What do you think about this large amount of nothing I've drafted out for you? I don't have a game yet to demo, so that's kinda... bothersome? Words hard.

I think I'm taking a break so my brain can process all the things I've learned about GBS. I imagine most people process things by continuing to work on them. I've found taking a step back and letting things simmer is better for me. I've solved many a problem that way. Many a physicist has inspired me to embrace this process. So, I'm going to be thinking about the conversations that need to happen in-game, the clues that need to be dropped, the secret areas requiring certain actions. I feel like I try to push the limits of the platform I'm using with my ideas.

With QBX, I couldn't do "good" animation without page swapping memory locations with that one command... ALLOC$ ? Hmm... I looked, but all I can find it things like VARSEG that could use it. When I saw other qb programs with it in there, it started feeling less like I was writing script from a high-level language and more like C (Which, sure, is up there in readability, but is way less readable than Inform, which apparently is up to v10). And I didn't want to program in C. Otherwise I would have. Right? Right.

Well, I've put away trying to build a platform from a base language. There are plenty of people making great platforms for developing games. Like GameBoy Studio. I'm glad I bought it. it's a great tool and has a great community. Don't know if you've looked it up, but Unreal development kit has come a long way since that janky thing on the original install disc. I thought it was super cool of a dev team to include their own development tool for *free* with their game. I loved seeing how graphics changed through the beginning of the internet. Unreal on Voodoo2 was mind blowing. Lights and shadows? Amazing!

I looked into learning Java and regret not having the mental stability to do so in the early days. I stuck with Quick Basic and couldn't get away from it. Looked into LUA as well, since it's a nice medium-high level language. But there's too much there to be able to concentrate on one area of development of skills. So many libraries to add, so many commands to learn. That's a difficulty I've encountered: vocabulary. Because I learned Apple Basic and QBasic so early, that language style is stuck and most prominent in my head. I never learned addressing, PEEKing and POKEing, segmenting, pointing, calling. I know *now*, haha, but look at what good it's done me, lol.

I looked at ASM a bit as well. Seems really cool to learn the ins and outs of a chip's architecture with all the addressing and commands available. Haha, yeah I checked out the 8086 stuff and thought, hmmm, maybe? Then I thought about the steps needed to just to print "Hello", and decided against it. typing "PRINT "Hello"" is a lot easier, imo, lol.

So, yeah. I'll leave the raw work to others who have the ability and time. I'll use the tools available to do what I can to present my creativity to everyone. I hope it's reaching some people. I hope some people feel inspired by my work. I know the ones of you I've looked at have inspired me. I'll be back. cest la vie