Indie game development

Hello world,

Today i'll write about indie game development, in the past game development was the apanage of very clever people (called geeks and sadly underestimated...) which had to work with very limited ressource due to hardware specifications (Comodore, Atari...). This equipment was expensive and difficult to operate as IT was in its infancy.

Blablabla... i'll not provide you a course about IT history uh...

Nowadays IT has been democratized (at least in Industiralized countries) and with IT, internet. Sharing knowledge never been so easy and fast, communities grow up, new languages appear...

Languages evolve with the community and some projects were created, frameworks were born, created from developers for developers. Now non IT people can make games, tutorials are shared all accross the internet... But making a game still needs mathematics (argh!) and physics (re-argh!) knowledge.

Do you remember the days you were at school in mathematics course "Hell! i didn't understand a bunch of these things >< ! and what is it used for ?! We will never use it in our profesionnal career!"

Unfortunately for you (me of course as i'm really bad in mathematics -_-') all (or at least most of) the universe works with mathematics (NOOOOOOOO!!! °o°).

As i didn't get much far in my studies (bac +2 in Fance: technical degree in application development) i didn't have any notion in physics and my knowledge in mathematics is weak. It's particularly a handicap in game development, and development in general, as it is supposed to require analytic and logical brain.

But, even you don't like mathematics and you're not good at it, you can make games, because your strenght are elsewhere. You can have good imagination, you can be good in graphics, you can see things with a new look...

Of course mathematics are important for development and most of all in game development, but it does not have to be a drag in you project.

There are many good tutorials on the internet, with patience, work and will you can do what you want.

So, if you feel you'll not make it, don't give up, let your big project rest for a while and keep working on a smaller and easier one, you'll get more confidence with it.

If i found easy way to explain mathematics or physics rules i'll use in my games i'll post it as i think knowledge must be shared to make things better.

Procrastination is your worst enemy

Hello world,

Today i'll talk about one of the worst enemy you will fight in your life: procrastination.

In french we have a quote for this: "Ne remets pas au lendemain ce que tu peux faire le jour même."

which means: Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

I used to joke with friends: "Ne remet pas a demain ce que tu pourrais bien ne jamais faire" which means: Never put off until tomorrow something you can never do... Ahah...

First, i used to read Gaston Lagaffe during my childhood, Gaston Lagaffe is a popular lazy but clever character in french/belgium comics (called BD). I really like this comic as even the character was an antihero he was sympathetic.

Personally i'm very lazy, but when it's needed i can be a hard worker, but sadly when i'm at home it's really difficult to get the motivation to develop instead of playing games on Steam... -_-'

Making a game is very exciting to me but i'm too impatient to watch the results that i can demotivate quickly when i see my progression is slooooooooow...

Of course the fact i make 4h a day of transportation for an uninteresting, time-consuming, demotivating, alimentary but correctly paid job can explain my procrastination too.

I can only develop during week ends.

Oh well! yeah! maybe i can code late at night during week, but i woke up early and get back home late so... NO LIFE. The joy of working in Paris, the center of the world...

But I keep hope and motivate myself to learn and develop the (too many) games I want to make. That's the objective of this blog, motivate me to carry on.

I believe I'm not the one to be a professional procrastinator (I used to say "porteur de la flemme olympique" unfortunately the joke is better in french than in english...) so, if whenever one of you have some tips or advice please tell me :D

I promise i will share mine once I found some ;-)