It's a New Year, Old Man

Hi everyone!

Well my wife, kids, and I spent the holidays celebrating Christmas, our 4th anniversary, our son's 3rd birthday, and the new year. Well, we spent everything after Christmas Day being sick. Our boy got so many toys from us and from relatives due to the double-whammy that he lost his mind.

Project S

I spent several hours on Project S over the holiday season, which was wonderful. My friend Rob Galanakis (who has a great blog here) mentioned that he dedicated an hour each day to his own projects. I took his advice and the results have been wonderful. While the length of time always seems too short, the evidence of progress is undeniable.

What is project S? Well it is a game. In it's current state, I can say that the S is for Sucks.

Using your Console

Not that console. I'm talking about the basic I/O functionality provided by a command-line type of interface. I stumbled upon something I find interesting about it and thought I should share.

I decided that I would like a UI at some point for Project S. One thing I don't have any desire to tackle right now is how to craft an interface in something new, now that XNA is going away. Sure, I can still use it, but the interest level is low. What I am interested in is modelling the game side of the game.

In order to work on it and test it, I do need an interface, so working through the console is a natural choice. I have discovered, though, that it forces me to make sure that my model code and my interface code remain very separate. Since I need to implement the "real" interface later, it would be really myopic to tangle up my temporary interface in the implementation of the game's functionality. I have also discovered that forcing this separation upon myself is going to make it "easy" to have multiple interfaces for the same game. One person could play the game against someone else, one using a text-based client (if they really wanted to, ugh) and another using Unity2D.

That reminds me, I really need to block out some of that personal time to brush up on Unity. So many things to learn!