played hopedagger's membrane massacre - all done in allegro, it hurts me that i haven't done anything of this calibre yet.. SURELY i could do that :P well honestly the problem is feature creep on that. i tried making a spaceship game and it turned out that i wanted to have a vector-based world that would be fully destructable and properly rebound collisions and stuff. i wanted buildable bases and all sorts of nonsense that i just didn't have plans for, and ended up giving up on it. membrane massacre reminded me of all that fun stuff. who's to say i won't pick up the reigns on that again?

i finally brawled through the important bits of Accelerated C++. wtf? like nothing at all in it on streams! i'm gonna need to buy an stl-specific book. sucky deal. but oh well i'll pick up what i need to as i work through Game Coding Complete, which is what i'm on now.

the topic on my mind right now is how much of a game needs to be known before one should start work on it. like, i realize that i should know everything about the game before i sit at the compiler. but who really does that? like, seriously. but how else am i ever gonna get anything planned if i don't know exactly what i need? i guess i answer my own questions.. ^_^

its funny that i'm reading a thick textbook on making video games and i haven't ever really sat down and figured out exactly what i want out of any of the projects i wanted to make. a racing game where you smash cars up, a spaceship game where you fight big moving bases, an adventure game where you look for items to make yourself more powerful... hasn't all this stuff been done before already? i mean, taking membrane massacre as an example - what sets this game apart from other spaceship games? honestly, not much. but i still had fun with it. isn't that what really matters? i guess thats the real question, what makes something fun?