Daphne is born from the loins of my mind
Mercifully, work (only?) typically occupies 8 hours of my week day. That leaves me with about 8 hours of personal time, half of which is usually spent on less exciting things like being in transit, eating, washing up, etc.
Often, at work I can’t wait to get home, I don’t think about what I will do at home and inevitably, when I get home, I spend several minutes frozen wondering what I’m going to do with my new found, temporary, precious freedom.
As I am not big on TV, I often find it difficult to wisely spend my precious free time. I am very conscious, almost obsessed, with the thought of me of the future looking back on my earlier years and asking my future self “Why was I such a useless git? What the hell did I do with my time?”.
It is for this reason that I often am programming video games in my free time. I know it is debatable whether or not mucking about with Flash and all its quirks is really a better use of my time than doing nothing, but different strokes for different folks…
The reason I like programming video games is that games are always unique. There is no standard list of GUI components you constantly use, there usually isn’t any database malarky to deal with. The GUI should be custom and unique and how the components of your game interact with each other and the user is totally up to you and what you think is awesome. I find that using standard components over and over again gets a bit boring. Finding slick new ways to access data is also quite dry. There are billions of frameworks that help make developing such classic database apps (enterprise apps?) super easy to the point that it’s no long fun to program.
Hence, I like my game programming.
The first step to creating any application of any significant size is finding a name by which to reference it. As I suck at finding cool names for things, I follow a Greek Nymph naming convention. So far Echo and Calypso have been used, so I randomly decided to choose Daphne, famed for her decision to escape Apollo’s gino-like obsession by transforming herself into a Bay Tree.
I will make no pretenses, Daphne is based upon Blizzards original Starcraft as much as possible. This is partly due to my pathetic lack of creativity, but it is also due to the fact that Starcraft is one of the best games ever made, definitely the best RTS. It is primarily for this reason that Daphne is a sort of homage to what I consider to be the best game developers on the planet right now (seriously, who makes better story lines than Blizzard? and with the glaring exception of Warcraft 3, all their games must of been at least partially developed by some sort of higher being).
So, I have started working on Daphne, So far I have the tile map stuff working fine and a lot of the multi-player communication stuff is sorted. I would like to post the game in updated carnations as I develop it, but right now, it’s so god damn ugly and lame that I’m going to have to wait until it is at least some what presentable to people with a vivid imagination.
