Printed out the example Space Invaders clone, scribbled all over it to make sense of it. Turns out the old method of learning how to program still works pretty well. I guess I’m a visual learner since the simple act of printing the code onto sheets of paper so I could draw on them caused the code to make sense. I sat on my settee and by cross-referencing the code to the Javadocs was able to work out the boilerplate code from the actual game logic.

I also found the possibly dead, but handy Pixen pixel art package for my Mac.

I’m experimenting with some woolly psychobabble ideas too. My PC is in my office and I do work on it. The work is quite interesting and motivating. I also have my Macbook which I could do work on, if I bought the VMWare Fusion key that I need. My Mac has Eclipse installed though, and the SlickSet stuff all set up. It’s turning into a portable devkit quite nicely, and is currently being my “fun” coding environment.

Sure, I could sit at my PC with its twin 19″ monitors, a mouse and a clacky IBM Model M keyboard and run Eclipse. But my Mac lets me sit in my bedroom and code, or do it downstairs in front of the telly. This portability lets me code when I want to, where I want to. Personal coding is supposed to be fun and amusing, rather than something rigid that you’re paid to do. So anything that makes it more fun is going to help with motivation.

I’ll install Eclipse on my PC at some point, just to check the code runs OK in Windows and Linux. I’ll also commandeer Amy’s PPC iBook to see what it’s like on that too She doesn’t know this yet though

Programming other people’s systems is hard. Programming your own apps is easy, you just make them do what you want. The only hard bit is stopping when they’re finished, or continuing when it gets slightly tedious.

I don’t like tedious coding. I’d rather go away and code a code generator, or use Excel and search-and-replace, or anything that’ll solve the problem with the least amount of effort. I’ve got SQL stored procedures that generate C# code from other SQL stored procedures.

I’ve got that urge to write some simple retro-styled games again. I keep getting this idea every so often, but then give up when it comes down to actually writing them. I either can’t decide what to do, or get bored hand crafting yet another sprite library and doing my own implementation of collision detection.

Fortunately them I’ve found three things that’ll make my life easier. LWJGL is the Lightweight Java Gaming Library, which is quite nice. Built on top of this is the Slick 2D game library that removes some of the tedium of moving sprites and handling their collisions. Then, to make it even simpler I found something called SlickSet which is a 2D game engine. It’s got premade collision detection, “actors” and ways of managing lists of things.

It comes with nothing but the Javadoc for documentation, but the examples are fairly simple to follow. I intend on working out my own little sets of documentation, then sticking them up here at some point.