What's Next

TLDR: I'm not going to continue Combatics Evolution. I want to write Minecraft mods and now need to convince myself not to re-write Minecraft to clean up the code.

For the last while, I have been playing various games and just relaxing. This is after a good crunch period with school and basically had little to no time to work on anything serious. I did do a couple of things and will highlight them below, but I also have had a few thoughts lingering in my mind which I will expand upon.

In that time, I wrote a simple platformer game with some Box2D and made a couple levels with Tiled. It was pretty epic, and rather fun. However, I decided to not develop it into something real. It was more just a play around concept and the game isn't easily something I can scale up as the uniqueness of racing against a clock as water rises gets old pretty quick.

I then took on the Java4k contest, I'm thinking its a nice once a year thing where I spend a day or two writing a simple game in 4KB. It is interesting working in those conditions because you have to think about what you're doing in a very unique way. I'm very happy with my work this year, as it was a much better submission this year with a lot less work.

During my exams, I needed something to play around with between exams to keep my sanity in check and also so I can easily have a break and go back to studying at any moment. I was working on a 3D version of Falling Sand which if you have no idea what that is, check out the link. I played this game years ago before I was really into programming and thought it was a neat idea. The 3d version is pretty cool, but getting it to scale up to an interesting size proved rather challenging. I then thought about networking some more and the idea quickly went away.

Of course, during this entire time I was thinking about Combatics Evolution, I tinkered a bit with a few things and did a ton of prototyping with networking to figure out what a good framework would be. In the end, I've come to the conclusion that the scope of Combatics Evolution is simply too big. If I want to turn it into a game, I'm going to have to scrap the networking and focus on the core game-play. The editor will stay simply because I will probably use it for developing the game. I'm just not feeling very confident in the project. As it is still too much to chew for a single developer without an artist without sacrificing my social life.

I did play around with the concept of having a server-side model, a proxy model on the client-side and handling the updating with a caching mechanism to keep the networking calls to a minimum. The client would be a simple thin client and focus on just rendering the information and submitting user input to the server. However, this would require rather large changes and I'm not sure it would even work out well at all without building a more serious prototype and that would not be a trivial task considering the complexity of map/units/effects/abilities/items/etc.

For the last year or so I've been thinking about building Minecraft mods. I've been waiting for the official moding API because I would rather not have to deal with the hassle of unbuilding minecraft, moding and repackaging. Then figuring out how to incorporate networking into the whole puzzle, and working with bukkit to support my single-player mod. Well, I did play around with LWJGL and brushed up on some low-level OpenGL. I honestly cringe at the idea of building UI by hand... Additionally, unobfascated Minecraft code is brutal to work in and some of the glaring design flaws in the overall code structure drive me nuts. I seriously would spend hours rewriting Minecraft instead of working on the Mod, but never the less. It can't be that bad if in about 3 hours I was able to turn the heart meter into a health bar and make it scale with your level.

This is a pretty damn long post... anyways, bottom line is. I don't want to work on Combatics Evolution anymore and I feel like modding Minecraft could be a lot more exciting.