Hey Everyone!

It seems to be homecoming time for GameDev lately, because not only is this my first post here since going off to the Air Force Academy, but fellow dev Hopedagger has also returned to Journal Land!

So I pretty much have a lot of stuff to talk about, so let's get on with it shall we?

The Academy...
So as some of you may remember, I was accepted into the United States Air Force Academy this year, which is the first item on a long checklist that eventually leads to me becoming a fighter pilot. Anyways, I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to have any time to be screwing around on a computer programming games given how busy we are with all the academics, athletics, and physical fitness stuff we have to do. Well, I've found myself being drawn back into the black world of game development. Being a cadet at a military academy is probably one of the most stressful ways to do the whole college thing, and I found that coding at the end of a stressful day(we have plenty of those) really helps me to unwind and relax. Maybe it's just because it reminds me of the good old days when Eugn and I would spend 3 hours a day designing our next grandiose game project. In any case, it looks like I can't escape the coding bug, which means more game programming exploits for you guys to read!

The Project
So since I spent a vast majority of my days standing at attention staring at nothing, I had nothing better to do than design a game in my head. I decided that I didn't want to do another Angels 22-esque game, and I knew that the laptops they were going to issue us weren't going to be the greatest machines, so I settled on a Turn Based Strategy game. Some of you guys might remember Eugn and I's prior turn based strategy attempt, Axis Shift.... or maybe you don't.... in any case, it was way too ambitious of a project for us to complete, and it fell apart a few months into development. Well, I feel like revisiting the Axis Shift idea, except with a far more limited scope. I'll be posting another update in a day or two that details what the game will be all about, but until now, you'll have to be content with this screen:



Random Academy Paragraph of the Day
So the last few months of my life have been packed full of weird stuff that I'd like to convey to you guys, but in an attempt to prevent this from becoming my personal blog of RL happenings, I'm going to limit my storytelling to one paragraph per update, we'll see how it works out:
But yeah, so Basic Training sucked.... A lot. The first day there was probably the worst day of my life. They woke us up at 4:00 in the morning (or 0400 [wink]), and kicked our doors in, while blaring "Welcome to the Jungle" over the loud speakers in our dorms. We then proceeded to get "beat", which is their little code word for a ridiculous amount of pushups and leglifts. Then we we'd go to breakfast, get beat some more, practice marching, get beat, go to briefings on military stuff, get beat again, and eventually go to sleep at 9:00 that night. That pretty much sums up the first month I spent at the Academy. The last half of Basic Training took place in this hell hole called "Jack's Valley", where we marched 7 miles just to get there, then set up a tent city and lived there for 14 days, running a plethora of hellish obstacle courses, and... getting beat (sensing a trend?). Tune in next update to find out what crazy shit we did in Jack's Valley!

Well, it's getting pretty late here and I have an early start tomorrow (as always...), so I'm going to have get to sleep. It's great to be back at GDNet, and hopefully I haven't lost all my game developing skills over the past 2 months! Peace Out!