My momentum for development is not very consistent. Over a year ago I signed up for GDnet. I've hung around since then, but I didn't make many journal entries and eventually let my subscription slide. Mostly it was because I was busy with a new job and wasn't making a lot of progress on any of the projects I started. Now things are a little different. I'm still working, but I've started making progress on a new project and I've been inspired by a few of the developer journals I've been reading lately. I've also come to the realization that I prefer writing small games, probably more suitable for kids than anyone else.

The project that I'm working on at the moment is called "Where's my bone?!" As you can tell, this is not going to be a ground-breaking project, but I'm enjoying it. At heart, the game is one of those arcade, maze games. You control a puppy who has to get all of the bones in a given time limit. Of course, it is never that simple and there are several challenges to overcome. Unlike a lot of games in this genre, the puppy does not have to run away from any enemies. Instead, you have to prevent your puppy from chasing after cats and squirrels, or being distracted by puddles of mud. The puppy will chase after a cat for some period of time, or likewise roll in the mud for some period of time. All the while the clock is ticking down.

I'm not sure if this game mechanic is going to work well. At the moment, I'd don't care too much if it does or it doesn't, I just think it'll be an interesting experiment and I've having fun working on it [smile].

I'm going to have to get someone to help me with the graphics at some point, mine are truly awful:



So, umm... yeah. That's supposed to be a puppy... Well, I'll admit I could probably do better but I'm content to have it as a placeholder for now. Still... I'm pretty sure I'm going to need some help [wink]

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I've seen a few people include a ToDo list in their journal headers, and I think that's a great idea. So I've put up a bare-bones list of what I'm working on. I'll flesh it out in time. At the moment I'm working on my MapConstructor app, which has a pretty unambiguous name. I'm writing a GUI in OpenGL for it. Yep, I know there are OpenGL GUIs out there, but I've never developed anything like that before and I wanted to figure out how it works. So that's what I've been working on this weekend. It's going pretty well I think. So far I have buttons and containers doing their thing, and I'm just getting the images sorted out. Then I want to make an icon container ( where the container automatically organizes the layout of the icons it's given ). I should have that sorted out by the end of today, and I'm hoping that I'll have made a start on getting the actual map structure in place too. Then it'll be onto the loading and saving the maps. Once that's done, it's back to 'where's my bone?!' with some decent maps.