Making a fair amount of progress with the 4E4 game. I have a basic story and game concept ready, it's nothing groundbreaking but it'll be pretty cool to see it realised as a game.

I don't have the internet at home anymore as I've just moved house, it makes things pretty difficult to research meaning I have to figure it out on my own. I actually prefer this, I've had the opinion for a while that the wealth of resources on the net can actually make some people worse programmers. This is definitely the case for me, if I spend the time looking for my solution on the net, I'll more often find some code or tutorial and copy it without understanding how it works. In this case, I have the thing I wanted but got no extra knowledge out of it. If I needed to solve this problem again I'd be in no better position to do so and will end up just searching for it again.

I prefer to spend time figuring a problem out myself before looking and asking for help; I think a few beginners out there could do well to adopt this technique rather than wanting to be spoon-fed the answers. Back when I first started making games there was no real public availability of the Internet so you *had* to figure out the solution on your own. That said, games and computer software has become exponentially more complex than it used to be, I wonder what strategy I'd take if I were just starting out today.

Ok back to 4E4 after that huge tangent.... The game content is specified 100% in script and Xml, it's pretty easy to get something up and running pretty quickly now. I'm now looking to form a basic game event system so that I can dettach the game from the input system. In effect, I want my input system to work out what's been pressed and then generate a game event (move_forwards, for example) rather than having the game code check for input and act accordingly. By doing it this way I should be able to create rolling demos and better script enemy behaviour. I'll be working on the event system tonight.