Day counting has become temporarily irrelevant. Due to things out of my control, the Minecraft server launch date has been delayed until next Monday. Which is just as well, there's a few things left that need to be sorted out. I would have liked the weekend to actually put some good work into these projects, but a couple extra days of practice wont hurt. In the meantime I can at least talk about the programs and such that I'll be using and learning.
Unity - I have a feeling I'm going to be focused a lot more on this one. You can download a free license for it through their site. Unfortunately for me, the add-on for Android is $400. Cheap by comparison, but I'm looking to spend closer to $0. In any case, I figure if I can learn this I'm going to have a lot more options later. There's definitely a lot of tools here, so while it might have a steep learning curve I think it'll be worth it in the long run. It's primarily 3d but can be forced to a pseudo-2d by locking the camera to an axis. Most of my plans are 2d oriented, but I think Unity would give it a much better look.
Blender - Free open source 3d modeling program. Even better, you can create models here and import them into Unity (which as far as I can tell is the popular method). My first impressions are mixed; lots of potential but the interface isn't very friendly. Other than that, it looks like it'll accomplish everything I need it to.
Visual Studio 2010 Express - This is my haven. C++ is what I started with, it's what I know best, and one of my projects is already started here. The express version is free to download with no real limitations, and has lots of resources available to it. Lots of people seem to dislike starting with C++, and it might not be the best for gaming overall, but in a pinch I know how to bend the rules enough to get my programs working here. If I can't figure out the things I need to learn, I'll be defaulting back to this.
SFML - The Super Fast Media Library is an open source package that is amazing for 2d games. It comes in 2 flavours; 1.6 and 2.0. I personally use 1.6 because 2.0 wasn't ready when I first installed it. While I gather that 2.0 has better support now, 1.6 has more documentation and information behind it. As far as actual differences between the two, I couldn't tell you. There's talk of eventually porting it to Android, but nothing has been done about it yet.
Small aside regarding SFML, there's some problem with SFML 1.6 and Visual Studio 2010 Express, that you need to go here, towards the bottom of the page there's a few extra files to download. I may not touch on it later, but that site has a lot of great tutorials for starting off with C++
Eclipse - An open source environment for Java. I know it's harsh bias but I'm not a fan. I know very little about Java, and I'm only getting involved with it because Android programming requires it. I hear that it gets easier as you go along, more so coming from C++, but I've yet to get there. Right now, it's just different enough that it actually makes LESS than zero sense.
Android SDK - This is the free kit that lets you write apps for the Android platform. Also, tons of great resources, tutorials, sample downloads, and support for it. Follow the instructions there for installing it and adding it to Eclipse. There's also the Android NDK available; another kit that lets you to use some C++ code instead of strictly Java.
You might notice a distinct lack of iOS here. In a perfect world, I'd aim my sights there too, but there's a few reasons why that's not going to happen.
1) There's no official iPhone SDK for Windows. I don't own a mac, nor do I intend to buy one. Yes, there are obtuse options (like setting up another partition for mac-OS and running dual operating systems) but I'm not looking for that either. Unity offers some support for iOS though, and apparently there are a couple unofficial packages that work to varying degrees, so all hope isn't lost.
2) No iProducts to test with. There's no iPad or iPhone lying around here that I can use to test things out. Even if I made a decent program to release, an emulator would only work so well. There's a minuscule chance that later I'll invest in something, but I have no intentions of that, and I'm not going to lose any sleep over it if nothing comes of it.
3) Flat Out Preference. As you can see above, there's already a lot on my plate right now, and one additional thing (that, for my purposes is completely different) is too much right now. A license to sell apps through the Apple AppStore costs nearly four times as much to sell through the Google Market. There's also all the horror stories of how the AppStore is managed which isn't exciting. All of this, plus the above 2, adds up to "Not Currently Worth It". Maybe later, but not now.
The next post will probably be a minor breakdown on the projects I have planned, and a rough schedule of how I'm going to move forward with it all.
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