Week 2 in my journey down the rabbit hole of learning how to code has come and gone. I said in last week's blog post that I'm pretty much starting from scratch, but I feel like in this shot amount of time I've pretty much got a handle on the Lua scripting language. That's not to say, however, that I know much about actually making games.

I've plugged a few memory leaks, though they're still there, hiding. I think they should work themselves out as I take the game from starter project into an actual thing. The game started as a basic version of Galaxian that I called "Fauxlaxian" but has since spiraled wildly out of control. Instead, I'm adding a story to flesh it out. I'm much better at making a story than making a game, color me Swery.

The story is about a bad guy trying to make the world's most addictive video game, so while everyone's distracted playing that, he can take over the world. The problem is that he doesn't know a damn thing about making games. The hero plays the game as its being created and iterated upon, dressing down the bad guy as he goes. It's basically the story of me making the game and the characters are basically both sides of my inner monologue. It starts as just squares shooting squares and then in later levels, it adds graphics, then they get better and the game gets more complicated.

The problem is that I have really bad priority problems. I'll spend a day working on animations, then a day working on music and sounds then a few hours on story, a few hours implementing everything, etc. It's lead to the actual code within the game being a goddamned mess. The story goes through a few scenes and a few levels and then is completely broken at the moment, but if you start at a point past all that, it's fine. It's gotten to the point where it might not be a bad idea to just put what I have off to the side and just start from scratch on the code itself, I'm just hesitant to do so because I've put now 2 weeks into it.

Some things continue to stump me, like how I can't get certain text to display properly or how the hell I'm going to rein this in and ever actually finish it. I can confirm, making video games is hard. I have no idea how big teams do it. I've tried to work for at least a few hours each day, but I've lost some time to that new Code Academy thing and the 1.0.4 patch to Diablo III (More than I care to admit). I've tried adding more screen grabs, but it keeps just loading forever, maybe next week.