Turning Things Around

I've been thinking a lot about what I'm doing with my life right now. It seems like my whole life (or at least my whole 'adult' life) I've wanted time to work on my own things, without being interrupted by school or work. When I decided to take a year away from work that was originally the intent; just to give myself time to do whatever I wanted. For various reasons I stewed on that decision for a long time. I didn't actually act on it until half a year after I'd decided to do it. During that time I had the idea that I could make games to support myself and continue not working a normal job. And I could do that, I still might, but that's not why I wanted to do this.

Since I moved I haven't really been happy. I got rid of work obligations only to build up artificial obligations around myself. It's been hurting my personal life and my relationship. Thankfully, I think I've started to turn that negativity around. So I'm going to get back to the real reason I'm here. If I happen to end up making something that makes me money, then that'll be awesome, but if not that's okay too.

I'm going to keep updating this blog, but from now on it'll cover whatever I happen to work on. You might see updates regarding the game (or other games!). After all, it's still something I want to work on. I just don't want to dedicate myself to it exclusively.

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Now for part two of this post. I'll talk a little about the non-game things I've been doing. While I was at my job, I spent some of my spare time designing a programming language. I may eventually go into more detail about it, but for now I will sum it up by saying it's roughly halfway between Lisp and C++. Working with Regular Expressions in the past two weeks got me interesting in getting back to that. After a year or so of design considerations, I finally did some actual work on it. I used Bison and Flex to make a parser for it. A friend of mine suggested using LLVM to compile it. For those unfamiliar, LLVM allows you to write low level code that can then be optimized and converted into machine code for various platforms, rather than having to create each implementation yourself.

I did actually work on the game a little too. I started working on a 3D model of the basic robot in blender. If I ever get around to writing a PLY parser, I'll import the finished product into the game.