Primal Scream

Right now I'm bogged down trying to get some infrastructure stuff done for my game and its very frustrating.

Later in January my time will be mine to schedule as it suits, but right now I'm still working days and coding on my game at nights.  It means I'm tired and not as on top of my game as I should be.

Things that seem conceptually simple and had looked like being fun to do, turned out to be a real pain in the neck.

And literally, as my home work setup is not ergonomically great.  Now I'm walking round like Quasimodo.

Its discouraging.  Why with all these amazing productivity tools can the simplest things be so painful to achieve?

I have a bunch of stuff hard-coded in the game and I'm trying to make it data driven.  The theory is I change a few values in a file, and hey presto the game springs to life with a whole new scene.  Minimal coding, just drop in the artwork and away we go.

Nuh.  Not so much.

To sum it up I've crossed a watershed in Objective-C where I know enough to start coding up things beyond the bounds of the tutorials and example code - and I absolutely have to do that because none of the things I want to do fit neatly into those examples.  So I can see what I need to do, but don't know it well enough to quickly write and debug the code to achieve it.

Things that ought to be simple - wiring up a few data structures to some UI elements - are painful beyond belief.  CoreData's magic binding stuff is not doing what I want, and even where I thought I had it nailed its not working how I thought.

There are a few API's and languages I know really well - those I am used to being able to express myself in quickly.  I can get stuff done fast.

And I will get to that point sometime with Objective-C but right now.... I want to throw the whole thing at the wall!  Grrrr!!!

Oh well.  Hopefully by the next blog things will be better!