It has been a while. My external blog has been shut down because overall I found it rather difficult to write about what I was doing at the time and it was killing my focus. I completed my very first micro controller project which is an Alarm Clock running on a PIC micro controller. Was a lot of fun working on such a low level. I learned so much in the time it took to complete the project that a reached almost a burn out point. So right now micro electronics is on the back burner as I need a rest. There is so much one needs to learn to complete something from the ground up. You need to learn to program the controller at the hardware level be it C or ASM, I used C for the alarm clock. Then there is all the circuit theory and interfacing to the various different components. It really is a lot of work and I very much respect people who do such tasks for a living. You would never think that writing the firmware for an alarm clock would teach you so much of the basics of an actually Operating System Kernel. It really does.
So now I am coming back into the world of game dev. Even though it was not a game it really felt great to finish a actual project from start to finish and I feel the project really taught me some important things about development that I was missing before. So now I really feel I am ready and have the discipline needed to tackle a game thanks to having to design and plan such a beast of a project. For those who do not know a Alarm Clock may seem simple but in reality there is quite a bit of work involved when dealing with such minute resources and hardware restrictions due to the way various modules are built into the silicon.
So right now I am looking for a route to take. I have always wanted to learn either DirectX or OpenGL but I really think it is not necessary because writing a game engine is really a lot of work just like writing the firmware for an alarm clock. You really need to know the little details and nuances. Is it possible for me to learn say OpenGL and build an engine sure it is but it probably will not be very good. So I am currently looking into UDK as it might work very well for a game I have been thinking about.
Would be nice to hear what others think on the topic so feel free to comment. Should I follow my dream of learning OpenGL or should I tackle UDK and actually get something playable 20 times quicker?
