boomity boom

[egypturnash]

One of the things I've been doing these past few days - instead of actually working on any of the projects I'd like to play with - is playing a clone of Geometry Wars. Ponderings on how the basic game is interesting, but the complete abstraction kinda wears on me, plus some mentioning of my old game coding efforts in a recent post's comments, made me do something insane: I started to want to do some game-making.

I tried Torque Game Builder because mharpold8 was raving about it recently. For me, well, it was incredibly sluggish to respond in the editor, and when it crashed three times before I'd even gotten past placing the background layers in the first tutorial, I abandoned it. Dunno if it's the Mac version or my system.

Then I went and asked for advice on Jeff Minter's forums, where a lot of hobbyist game coders hang out. Got reminded of Blitz, as well as SDL. And found out there's a Java games library that actually knows how to talk to the joystick.

I overcame the reflexive 'ugh!' from knowing Blitz started life as a dialect of BASIC. I now have a swarm of little wasp-girls on my screen, flittering all around under my left joystick, exploding out in all directions at a button press, and shooting little laser-beams into the air at a touch of the right stick. Yay for simple frameworks!

Though, honestly, I kinda miss 68000 assembly on the Amiga.

I might put something online tomorrow, for all two or three people reading this who have a Mac and a gamepad. First I probably need to generalize the gamepad a little, mine's kinda weird. Or I might switch to SDL and [choose language here]...

Addendum: Also I get to write comments referring to the "preferred intervespal distance". ♥