Developing a Developer

Hello readers.

In this post I'm going to announce something special. I want to make a little game. It's going to be a small thing, but it's because I promised a friend to make one, and I have to fulfil my promises. It's also the perfect excuse to catch up with this beautiful hobby.

This is mainly a training project. I'll write posts in a journal entry style. That way you can track my progress.

I've divided this project in four phases:

1) The Basis

2) The Tools

3) The Experiments

4) The Games

PHASE 1: The Basis

I'll try to restore the knowledge about game programming I had in the past. It's basically reading this book:

“Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python ” is a free ebook. It's oriented to children that want to make computer games but don't know how to program. When I finished my first programming course (it lasted a year) I realized that I knew many algorithmic things. I knew how to search items in lists, storing integer in arrays, import libraries... It was a very good improvement taking into account that I started without knowing anything about programming. Nevertheless, I didn't know how to do something actually useful. And games... well, it's sort of what we all think of, don't we? So that summer, I found this book and read it. After that I made two simple games, but they were lost one sad day when I accidentally erased all the information in my hard-drive.

PHASE 2: The Tool

It's learning more about game programming but it will be mainly using the Pygame library. Actually, this phase is yet another excuse to read the sequel of the previous book: 

 

I have no idea what it's going to contribute to my knowledge, but I had so much fun reading the first one that I have to read it now.

PHASE 3: The Experiments

This phase it's probably going to be a little bit more chaotic. I'll make a kickoff game that doesn't take a lot of time. Let's see how it goes. I'll also read a few open source programs to take knew ideas. I also may do this kind of things after reading the first book.

PHASE 4: The Game

I'll program the game. I have no idea how long this phase is going to take me. Maybe two weeks? Three? A month and a half? I have an idea about how it's going to be, but I have no idea how I'm going to be posting about it without spoiling the argument. We'll see.