Sunday, June 5, 2016

Wow...it has been a long time!

Hello everyone! (or anyone that still checks this...)

I hadn't realized it had been so long since my last post. I apologize for not posting sooner.

What Have I Been Doing?
After my last update on Heroes' Journey I had the opportunity to work with a coworker on a home automation project using a Raspberry Pi as the brains of the system. It was a lot of fun to work on, but we ran into a couple severe problems, and decided to scrap the project. This was a hard decision because I had already put almost a years worth of work into it, but in order to work around some of the problems I would have had to learn a new programming language. That's not that big of a deal (going from C# to C++, for instance), but there were a lot of  other factors that led us to scrap it for now.

A lot of the problems had to do with the graphics framework that we were using to for running C# on a Linux based system. It would randomly delete all of the auto-generated UI information and I'd have to start over (Version control helped immensely with this). We were willing to work around that bug, but we ran into one where when we went to add a graphics object to the screen after the program had been initialized the program would just close. There were no errors in Visual Studio, and none of the additional error handling that I put in the code would get hit. It would also quit at different points in the method, which led me to believe that there is an exception being thrown deeper in the framework, that is not bubbling up to my code. Either way, I had no way of debugging the problem to figure out a solution.

We played around with using Windows 10 IoT instead, and the UWP framework for that was very stable and easy to use, but there were other restrictions with IoT that would have made updating and debugging a lot harder if this was sold commercially.

I may continue working on a Windows 10 IoT version for personal use, but that will be a while before I get around to that.

I regret not posting something before I dropped off saying I wouldn't be posting for a while, but it's a little late now.

What Will I Be Doing?
Moving forward I plan on sticking to Game Dev, and to try to hone some of those skills. I'm currently working with Dave Troyer (awesome artist, check him out!) on a small game. It's a dungeon crawler with a twist! I'm doing all of the programming for it, and he's doing all of the awesome art! I'm hoping to post more frequently with updates on that, or even just with code bits of stuff I've learned while developing it. After this game, or maybe after a few, I'd really like to revisit Heroes' Journey, and maybe get Dave's help on that one as well. But we'll see how this game goes and go from there!

I hope to have more of an update early next week, so stay tuned!

Thanks for hanging out!