Catch up

Well, been a while. What have we been doing? I've completed a number of projects, but this year has really been dominated by the "day job". I've expanded the MVC framework to the point where it's a very usable chunk of code. This has been something used in production code. As such, I've gotten away with spending a small amount of my day job working through various bugs and throwing out improvements. The code is now at a point where I'd be happy for other parties to use it, though it has little documentation at the moment.

My son and I have started talking about writing a game. This is a subject that has happened a few times. I'd originally played about with Codea (iPad IDE, focused on Games and graphical applications), but that became too hard to find the time for. But recently, after watching Indy Gamer the movies (god, that is an inspiring film, Jonathan Blow, Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes are now my pet heroes!) I'm not aiming to write the next Braid or Super Meat Boy, but I have a 9 year old inner me (and, oddly a 9 year old son), who desperately want to write a game. Seriously, from the year I got my first computer (Sinclair Spectrum 16K, circa 1984) my friends and I (one specifically) obsessed about making a game "with moving graphics". I got to the point that I could write the basics in Sinclair Basic, and I was pretty happy. Moving to the 16bit era killed that dream. It became way too much for me to be able to do that (and I found girls and teen aged angst more appealing.) But, somewhere deep down, a game is waiting to be written. My son is my key ally. He loves video games and he is young enough to have no preconceptions and wants to throw lots of ideas at the project. I can then filter these and cherry pick his better ideas and my experience. We might make something cool. It won't be anything "big", but I know it will be cool.