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I wanted to write something this clear, but Shaterri beat me to it, saying in part that "it's societally-designated recap-and-reflection time again. I really do enjoy the opportunity, too -- a year is just about the right span of time to look at what's been going on and figure out what's desired."

Like Shaterri, I enjoy doing this even when I'm not happy with the news. Let's face it: In terms of accomplishments, 2005 was a crappy year. I got only one truly important thing done, and that was gaining custody of my child. I kept my job but then I didn't expect to lose it. I posted 37,000 words this year, falling short of my resolved 50,000. I didn't finish a novel, nor did I finish any of the Journal Entries series that I really meant to get involved in, such as Kaede & Eshi, Madships, or The Reservationists. I published the second Aimee' novel, but I had finished it in 2004. I didn't write any programs. Although I finished the spoken part of my Japanese courses, I have not had the wherewithall to start the written part, and I still have trouble with the vocabulary for the spoken component. The garden in my backyard continues its slow decline. I finished none of the software programs I started last year, because they all felt too much like work. And let's not talk about my love life; it's in tatters, mostly because the stress and schedule of other things never gave me the free time to indulge. Omaha and I had enough trouble finding time for one another! I started an exercise routine and fell out of it; I did manage to bicycle to work ocassionally, but not enough to make a difference. I started a policy of cooking one new recipe a week and by the end of the year was desperately trying to scrounge common meals out of the kitchen. About the only thing to be proud of there is that I never descended to buying fast food. Even in the mere consumption of media I didn't accomplish a whole lot: I read only 14 books and watched three TV series (Rome, Ghost In The Shell: Standalone Complex, and Honey & Clover). Only my music collection grew by any appreciable size, and only because I decided to explore "progressive metal" as a genre, discovering Ayreon, Flowing Tears, and Entwine.

Bleah. A record of incompletes. If this were school, I'd be repeating the grade.

Picking up an old subject

For some reason, I got it into my head over the holiday to write a video game. I haven't written a video game in nearly 20 years. But the idea was just a toy idea and it seemed harmless enough. As a toy problem, I decided to try my hand at cloning the 1980 game Ripoff, which also appeared in the Journal Entry Flying Tylia. How hard can it be? It has three dynamic classes in a containerized space: you, the bad guy tanks, and the cargo canisters they're trying to steal. Imagine my pleasure when I found an essay from the original author of the game, who described the flocking behavior of the enemy tanks and how the game's cooperative play mode evolved in great detail.

As it turns out, it's a lot harder than I thought. In 1986, everyone for whom I was writing (the Amiga audience) had exactly the same CPU: a 68020. Just getting enough performance out of the clock, even with the Agnus video card adapters, was hard stuff. Nowadays, you have to worry about the clock being too fast and the refresh rate is an independent feature. Sound is a lot more complicated under Linux than it was under the Amiga.

The most annoying thing, however, was every single book assumed that you were developing on and for Windows. One went so far as to say that you "could not expect to have a future" as a game developer if you did not understand DirectX. (Yes, I know there's a Game Development for Linux book out there; Barnes & Noble didn't have it in stock.)

Another, lesser annoyance was that every game book felt like a disorganized mess. One had a long and wonderful section on basic geometry-- with absolutely no examples or explanation as to why you would want to know that stuff. Another had a long section that proposed to teach you C++; if I wanted that, I would have bought a C++ book. Others sought to teach you business expertise at one end and artificial intelligence at the other.

Still, everything I've seen says it can be done. Hell, it was done in 1979 with a couple of IC chips Tim Skelly wired together. Just... nobody's done it since.