Moving Away from Web Projects

Writing for the web is hard.  That’s likely coming from my lack of experience with web related technologies more than anything.  Perhaps I have been dealing with consoles and PCs too often, but that has definitely shaped the way that I think and the way that I approach things.  It could also be due to the fact that web related technologies (as least when it comes towards games) are still not entirely developed enough for someone like me to easily work with them.  I admit I am likely spoiled in this regard.  There are very powerful compilers and debuggers that I have a lot of experience with and am very comfortable using.  Granted, part of my goal with my personal projects is to try and do things that I am not doing at work so that I can expand my skillset, but I feel that I also should be enjoying myself while doing it.  And after several months of trying, I am finding that I am just not enjoying myself when it comes to attempting to write games for the web.

First I attempted to work with Google’s PlayN architecture.  This was an exercise in futility as the instructions were complicated and I was constantly getting lost in the myriad of tools that you had to deploy and configure in order to even get the simplest of builds working.  Likely not too big of a deal if you are used to being in that style of development (thinking of all the tools I work with on a daily basis in my normal job and I would imagine they are comparable), but very difficult to get used to when you are approaching it as a newbie like I was.  Over time it seemed like things got simplified a bit and I was able to work around several of the issues and get some basic stuff going.  But ultimately I was still a stranger in a strange land and just couldn’t handle juggling all the processes in order to work effectively.  Maybe things are better now, but I haven’t looked at it for months.

Next I decided to try to strip things down to a simpler toolset and just approach it using HTML5 and Javascript.  One of the reasons why I wanted to attempt using PlayN was to avoid the pitfalls of development in Javascript (ie it sucks from the best I can tell), but I figured that I would eventually learn the traps and get used to it.  I had decided to just go with a simple text-editor approach using NetBeans and downloaded a JSLint plugin to help me spot dumb errors.  I was using Firebug for Firebox in order to have some sort of a debugger, but even that proved to be not sufficient enough for my tastes.  I kept running into issues where the script would just abort, without any reason or direction given as to the cause of the termination.  It got to the point where I just wasn’t enjoying programming any more, which made working on my personal projects take a backseat to just playing games and having fun.

So I have decided to return to the world of compilers and pick up where I left off with my personal projects in C# and focus more on the tool development like I was originally.  This still allows me to branch out and try new things, just a few less so it is a bit more manageable while still balancing everything else that I am in my life.  In the spirit of ditching other tools, I am also planning on scrapping my work with WinForms and just building a new UI framework from scratch.  This will allow me the flexibility to be able to implement what I want, plus I really enjoy messing around with the guts of systems like this (and I doubt there is a huge demand for game programmers with WinForms experience).

Hopefully this old dog will still be able to learn a few new tricks, I just realize that I don’t have to take on everything new all at once as I just don’t have the time to jump in headfirst like that any more.  So I am going to stick with stuff that might not branch out quite as much, but that I would enjoy working on for the long haul.  If nothing else I’ll be able to experiment and try out things that I wouldn’t have the time or permission to do in a normal work environment.  For example, another project that I want to do is to mess around with writing a DX11 ray tracer and see if I can play around with compute shaders some (no idea if this would even be sensible yet, but it is something I’d like to look in to).  Plus I think it would be fun to optimize and see how fast I can make it.  Now I just need to somehow find the time…