Managed World

 Hello. My name is Jason Olson, and I'm...... a Slacker. I'm freely admitting it here in front of the world. I start things that I don't finish, I bite off more than I can chew, I promise things way too often and hardly ever deliver. You just need to look at my multiple runs at a series of game development articles to realize that. One thing I'm going to do differently this time? First, I'm not going to promise because there might be a good chance that I will personally lose interest in the subjects I'm talking about. Second, I'm going to try to be realistic with myself.

What does this mean for you? Hopefully, it means no more sitting around cussing at me because I've dropped something just when I got your attention. I've lost track of the number of emails I've received about "when I'll finish the damn articles already!!!!" So, with this whole move to my new home, I asked myself why I didn't finish those articles. And I think the reason is that I tried to make them more grand than I could really do. For instance, anyone that has hung around the Beginner's Forum on GameDev has more than likely lost count of the number of new developers (not just new to game development, but new to development in general) that have claimed "I'm going to build the best MMORPG EVER!". And this for their first development project ever. Not a good start, that's for sure. Well, although I hate to admit it to myself, I have been one of these very people.

I think part of it is just me getting to know myself more. I have flaws (and a LOT of them at that). Well, rather than feeling all pitiful about myself for everything I *haven't* done, I'm going to try smaller things and then be happy for the things I *have* done. Part of this attitude exhibits itself in this very blog. I've owned this domain for a long time now and have been (frankly) too damn lazy to get a hosted solution and make a proper site. The prior version was just a hacked group of static HTML pages and was a pain to maintain. I never got up the energy to get this hosted because it would "take too much work". I would have to build my own solution. I would have to add all this functionality. And after all that, it would still not be nearly as good as I wanted it to be.

Well, to counteract that feeling I got off my rear end and decided just to use dasBlog. Why? Because it was extremely easy to setup, and because it has more functionality than I could probably develop on my own with the amount of free time I have. After all, if there are already solutions out there that exist for blogging, why in the world would I develop my own when it isn't the problem I'm solving. It isn't even a problem I'm interested in solving. I just want to deliver content. That's it. So why waste my time developing a home-grown blogging solution when I could be spending that time with my family, or writing games, or writing articles about writing games, or writing music, etc.

But, really, what is the payoff? I'm hoping part of the pay off will be immediate. I've realized that the people that liked the game development articles I was writing probably don't care if I was developing a mario-clone, or whether I'm developing a simpler two-dimensional space shooter. After all, I firmly believe that the lessons learned when architecting a space shooter can be directly applied to developing a mario-clone. For me, I think the vision of developing a mario-clone was "more than I can chew". I have to admit something here, I'm not a game development expert. In fact, I haven't developed a single complete game yet (of course, that's probably no surprise to most of you who know me).

Because of this, I have decided to fire up the articles again in order to develop a simple space-shooter (the original vision). The first couple of articles that people have read will not change. The good news is that the articles posted already are still relevant. In fact, I will be trying to get around to posting those articles on this site sometime in the near future (no promises though this time :)). Maybe if I actually stop procrastinating and do something for a change, I'll be able to get back on the Z Buffer's linking good side :).

Considering how many of you I have probably let me down in the past, let's hope this is different. Stay tuned (or not, whatever).