Press-Ganged

Well interwebs, it's official!

No, I haven't got any demonstrable software for stratagem yet.  This post is completely unrelated.  No today, I instead cave to vast amounts of peer pressure (and industry pressure) and bring my old windows machine, henceforth to be referred to as, "the brick," back into service and learn flash.

Two things have compelled me to do this.

Firstly, I am always intent on keeping up with my fellow gamedevs, and there has been a collective realization that we all need flash in our respective tool boxes.  Not wanting to fall behind, I have have made it the top of my temporary priority list.

Secondly, orca jam is coming up this weekend.  As my good buddy Colton Philips pointed out, a serious game jam is a great opportunity to learn a new tool.  I have a simple twist on a platformer in mind and I want to learn flash quickly enough to implement it at the jam.

While I'd like to do this from the ground up and really understand flash, I don't have all the time in the world, so I'm taking a bit of a shortcut for this weekend.  Flashpunk is a collection of libraries specifically for game creation that also has a good tutorial.  This seems to be a good temporary stand in for a detailed understanding of the underlying features, at least for this first run.  

And this brings me back to the original point of this post.  As I have been reminded every time I have looked at flash in the past, Flashdevelop is the editor of choice, and its installation is step 1 of Flashpunk's tutorials.  However, there is no Mac version.  And this my lovely readers is why I have the task of dusting off the brick and reacquainting myself with the burden of carrying it around (I think the air has spoiled me a bit in that regard).

I'm not a mac fanboy by any stretch of the imagination, and a windows partition was always planned in to my original decision to buy a mac in the first place.  On paper, I could have the best of both worlds:  Mac for sleek, fast running professional things, and Windows for fun times and anything I couldn't get a mac version of.  However, I underestimated my memory needs, and windows 7 is unreasonably large, leaving me caught with two equally unattractive options.  Go through the painstaking process of installing windows xp on my mac and accept that the compatibility will only extend to old software created before about 2011, or fork ove the cash necessary to upgrade my hard drive.  Money is a bit tight right now, but I don't want to go backwards, so I have resolved to take the second option as soon as it becomes viable.

Until then, I'll just have to make do with the brick and dream of the day when I will at last be able to play dragon age origins.  Until then, NO SPOILERS!

Anyway this rant has sufficiently distracted my while my laundry runs and flash develop installs itself, So I must be getting back to work.

Before I go, I should mention that I have started a bare bones stratagem project in eclipse and will be tending to it as time allows, but it's all scaffolding with nothing operational just yet.  Big things take a while to get moving.  That's just physics.

Later!