Hi! This is my first entry. I guess I'm just keeping this journal to track my progress and help me be accountable to working a little bit on my project every day (and hopefully be something nice to read in the meantime). A little about myself: I'm a Junior studying statistics, I like video games (who doesn't?). When I play a game, I prefer to try to be competitive, but usually end up just following the scene. I started with Diablo 2, moved onto Ragnarok Online (private server with 10x rates), Warcraft 3, Starcraft:Broodwar, Super Smash Brother Melee, and now am bouncing between Wakfu and Starcraft 2. I briefly played Sword of the New World, Gunbound, Navyfield, Fire Emblem 6/7, and Final Fantasy Tactics, but only for a fraction of the time I played the games on the previous list.

Anyways, I figure I'd keep my progress so I (and maybe others?) can learn from my mistakes and struggles. I have little to no programming experience - I started as a computer science major, took 2 classes (I did well!!) but chickened out after seeing people years ahead of me sleeping in the underground lab. Despite this, I want to make a multiplayer game, using smartfoxserver.

I actually already "made" a game with my friend (who did the programming portion, I handled design and all the other little details) which fell flat on its face as soon as he lost interest. You can check it out at almasytactics.com, but it's pretty much dead now. So, I had 2 choices - try to learn to cakePHP and continue the game, or learn from its gameplay mistakes (there were plenty) and try to rebuild it from scratch.

Anyways... I'm going to try to commit at least 1-3 hours each weekday to my game (which may be hard since finals are coming up, but whatever), so 5-15 hours/week.

Today, I read through some of the documentation of smartfox. I'm extremely confused, as I don't know what shit goes where. I got the battlefarm example working, I guess that's a start. My goal for now is to try to get a working prototype up so I can test if the gameplay is actually interesting.