Rainy Saturday

It’s pouring down rain today. So of course, I went out for a walk in it. = D

I had to go to the Post Office anyway, to get my tax forms. It’s only about 4 blocks away, so it would be ridiculous to walk, no matter how hard it’s raining (and it is raining pretty hard). Besides, I love weather. The more weathery it is, the better. Even though I was soaked before I even made it to the corner, it’s really more about the experience than it is about comfort.

As I was walking, I noticed that all the little birds were sheltering under parked cars. Which got me thinking… isn’t that the kind of place cats would go to get out of the rain too? Presumably, the cats and the birds aren’t under the same cars, sharing some kind of uneasy truce until the weather lets up. So there must be some cars with birds, and some cars with cats. Cat cars and bird cars. How organized, how civil. Maybe the birds can peer across the street at other cars and see cats glaring back at them.

I spent most of the morning programming up a storm. Now that I’m basically done my S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mod (maybe I’ll post a link at some point), I’ve started a new project. This time around, it’s my own game, from scratch.

It might seem strange that after programming all day at work, I’d want to come home and program some more. But the two experiences are totally different. At work, I’m often working within a huge, pre-existing code base, making small additions or fixes. On the other hand, when I work on my own games, I get to start fresh and write everything. It’s like the difference between driving in city traffic compared to roaring down a wide open stretch of highway. I learn different things from those experiences too. At work, I see the solutions that other people have come up with for certain problems, and get to see the results and weigh their merits. On my own projects, I have to come up with solutions for everything myself. I get to decide how everything works, in a much more hands-on, experimental way.

I like that when I start a project at home, I get to start out by writing reams of code. At work, I seldom create new functions and almost never create new classes. When I start an independent project at home, I might write a dozen classes in a day. Er… sorry for the programmer-speak. But the gist of it is that doing my own thing at home is often a much rawer act of creation, and a lot more satisfying.

Anyway, all of this is in its very early stages. It will be a while before I even have enough going on that I can start posting screenshots and talking about the game. But the important thing is that I’ve started it, things are proceeding at a good pace, and I’m having fun. = ]