Day 1

Today is a special day for me. It is Day 1 of my Indie adventure! I’m pretty excited and a bit scared!



I'll be blogging about my experience, and I think I'll do some streaming as well.  I haven't made any solid decisions at this point and this was intentional.  I'm a bit burned out from my day job and I need some time to rest and rejuvenate.  I don't want to make any decisions until those stressors have passed because the context of these new decisions is completely different than the mental space of having an energy consuming day job at a large corporation.

I can share that the decision that's been most on my mind lately is, "What technology to use?"  If you look at my gamejam history you'll see I've tried a lot of different technologies but never settled into any one in particular.

I wish Jai, Jonathan Blow's C-style language, was released because I'd probably just jump into that and see what it was like. I quit using C/C++ back in 1999 because I hated how insane things were getting with std, macro hell, DCOM, COM/+, Apartments, BSTR and the whole UTF-guess-the-number game etc.  Jai seems to be a solution to all that craziness and even adds some really powerful features like compile-time execution. My gut instinct is it will fit my natural workflow and how I think about problems.

I've been using Unity for the last 5 year professionally and so that seems like a natural choice, but I've never had a gamejam go well with Unity.  I think this is because of just how complex Unity has grown.  It works well for medium to large teams, but as a solo indie, I worry that complexity undermines workflow and productivity.  It also doesn't respect Data-Oriented Design and often hides data from you.  And even though they are "cross-platform" you still run into native compiling features that aren't supported like android's multi-dex to get around the 64K method count limit. I love what Unity has done for the industry by opening game development to way more people but they often fall into the trap of fixing the easy problems, not the hard ones.  I'm also worried that complexity is ramping up instead of down now that the film industry has become a target.

I'm sure I'll expand on all of this later.  Thanks for listening!