In my last entry, I mentioned moving on. It's taken me a while to gather all my thoughts, but here goes nothing. I am not a game developer, in fact I've made a nice living doing web development since I graduated college. However, I've always taken a keen interest in developing games. I bought my first Java gaming book back in college, "Black Art of Java Game Programming". A great book, definitely a good read. I've also purchased other Java game programming books over the years and never done anything with what I was learning.

That being said, I'm finally in a really great place in life and I have some extra time to finally devote to these types of things.

So, my plan is to work hard in developing my game programming skills and I hope to keep track of my progress through my blog. I will definitely get pulled off track for various other projects I'm working on, but game programming will definitely be the focus of this blog, at least for a little while.

I don't know exactly what my end goal is, nor do I know exactly how I'm going to get there. I plan on just doing whatever fits my fancy and working on it until I feel I've learned all I can from it. What I do know is that I'm planning on using Java, or some platform of it (JavaFX, Groovy, JRuby, etc...), and I plan on using Scenario because I really like the scenegraph idea.

Besides that, my next task is going to be to create some sort of platform game. I'm thinking I'll use the little ninja guy above as the main character, and probably some free graphics from Lost Garden.

Here are my initial plans for the platform game.

1. A restricted view-port for an up-close view of the characters current position.
2. A mini-map view for showing the characters position relative to the entire map.
3. Some message view for showing status messages and the like to the user.
4. Maybe some status view to show the status of the character: HP, MP, etc...
5. A text-based mapping system so levels can be created easily

I've also recently undergone some Scrum training, so I think I'll try applying that here. Since it's just me, things will go slow, but it'll definitely be a learning experience. I'll try 2 week sprints for now, and will hopefully have the initial UI laid out and presentable at the end of the first sprint.

Wish me luck!