when i was a kid, you could build a simple game or application by dragging and dropping a few UI controls, and gluing them together with a few dozen lines of BASIC or Pascal or HyperTalk. it might take 15 minutes, at most, to get your little character walking around on the screen. this is how we ended up with a lot of hilariously good and cheap shareware you could share on BBSes in the 90s.
for the past year i've been quietly working on building a software thingie that doesn't exist anymore. i've been building a software toolkit that's kinda like Visual Basic and HyperCard and Borland Delphi, designed for making tile-based 2d games.
i've been using it to build my own little goofy games, and improving on the drag'n'drop IDE as i figuring things out. it's not done yet, and has a long ways to go before it's ready for other people to start making their own little applications and games. think PICO-8 or ZZT if they had grown up on a steady diet of Windows 3.1 and GeoWorks Ensemble instead.
i'm really, really bad about polishing turds to infinity and never releasing them. to break that habit, i've built a mini-website for the IDE/Shareware Creation Kit. it's called Exigy, named like a bad 80s metal hair band or richard garriott game.
i'll be posting weekly blog/devlog updates there, so i don't irritate anyone with them on this account. there is an rss feed button at the top right if you hate my demonic php and css.
@vga256 yesssss the world knows about it now!
@ThreeOhFour i know what a terrible mistake
@vga256 I actually find it really cathartic to post about stuff though. Even going "Hey, this week was frustrating, nothing worked how I wanted it to, that's part of the process" is interesting reading for some people I think.
@ThreeOhFour @vga256 I certainly find it very reassuring to read that kind of stuff from people I know produce awesome things.
@ThreeOhFour yes! your blog was actually the impetus for adding the dev diary to the project site. i realized i needed a place to think out loud about what i'm doing, because i really have no plan or rationale about how any of this works. it's just fumbling around in the dark until something works. i don't think i'd ever make a good software project manager.
@vga256 It helps me a lot to have that page to discuss things with, and it's also nice to have that "oh I have to have something to write about this week, so I have to make some actual progress rather than just playing around with fun stuff" too.
@ThreeOhFour haha yes. it's good!
@ThreeOhFour @vga256 I just spent two hours trying to get ffmpeg stuff to work and found a post saying 'ignore everything else, just copy ffmpeg.exe into your project directory' and... ugh, it worked.
@DarkestKale @vga256 I know that feeling of I'm glad this is working now but I hate that this was the solution.