The Next Thing

So it has been more than a month since I boldly analyzed my fickleness and decided I was going to do Game Programming with Graphics on Android...

Well, that didn't happen.  After UberConf, I tried to get started on iOS game development with Cocos2d but never got further with my "Space Viking" game than a barbarian looking dude on a desolate background with a dark sky.

It didn't help that my good friend Charles Erwin suggested that I look into some other scripty way to do game dev using some new language that eludes me right now.  But in all fairness, it does not take much to sidetrack my 'creative juices'.

These days my 7 month old is getting up in the middle of the night again, my year old project is going 1.0 in approximately a month and my good buddy Matt and I are learning/playing a new RPG called EclipsePhase that is somewhere between Star Frontiers, Top Secret, Transhuman Space and Call of Cthulu.

We just finished an evening of role-playing where we bailed on a complex adventure that would span the solar system in exchange for another "Meet the Mob" type adventure on the same Venusian aerosat, Parvarti, that we had the last extended 'mission' on.  Yes it is a cop out.  Almost Earth gravity with a very site-based adventure feel.  Much easier than detective work floating around asteroids near Jupiter.

Anyways I digress and that is my point.  I don't need a side project right now.  At work I'm doing a message queue based solution for file conversions to work around issues using MS Office directly for synchronous conversions to PDF-A files.  Not exciting in and of itself but the async stuff is kinda fun.

Learning a new language right now is out since I suck at Java and I'm only slightly better at Groovy.  So my focus needs to be on being really good at them before I rush off to some other language.  Enterprise integration patterns and ActiveMQ are more interesting to me than iOS game development and the former actually might pay the bills.  For fun in the evenings, I'd rather read sci-fi or EclipsePhase sourcebooks since in a week or two I might be staring at someone (Matt) that actually cares what I read related to that.

Corona...that's the name of the programming language for game dev that Charless suggested I look at.

Anyways, I'm focusing on system integration and messaging for work, Java/Groovy skills refining for work and fun and sci-fi/EclipsePhase for fun.

I'm booked but happy to not be worried how I should be using my 'free' time.