Tired of My Day Job. Sigh.

For the past few days, my day job has required a lot of my time.  Which I really hate.  It means I've been dead in the water on creating content for both of my websites and my deviant art page and the single outstanding commission that I have.  All stopped while I deal with stuff at work

My day job involves work as a software engineer.  It's not what I really want to be doing.  I do want to continue to do programming.  But I'd rather be doing something like indie game development than being in the daily grind at an enterprise software company dealing with all the stuff you have to deal with there on a day to day basis.

My pipe dream is that I quit that job and am able to focus on creating content for my two websites coupled with doing some indie game development, and that somehow those two things will be enough to pay the bills.

I'd certainly be a lot happier if I could do that.  Now if you crunch the numbers on things, it's unlikely that those activites (my websites + some indie game development with me as a one man developer) would make enough to live on.  But it doesn't mean I'll give up the dream.  I still want to at least try on the side to do it.

But weeks like this, where work at my day job ramps way up, are discouraging.  Because weeks like this stop me in my tracks on the website front and on the stuff I've been doing to get more into indie game programming

A couple of years ago I bought a cheap Mac Mini and loaded it up with XCode and dabbled with some IOS games programming for fun. I  made a little cat game that I never put into the app store or anything like that.  But I really felt like a fish out of water doing that type of development. I love the ipad and ipod touch as an end user, but I am just not a Mac guy.  I felt awkward on the Mac.  And I hated XCode and Objective C.  Historically, and at work, I'm a Java guy.  I've used IntelliJ and Eclipse for development.

So I ended up selling the Mac and punting on my little cat game.  Fast forward a couple years and the environment for games development for ios and android has gotten better.  There are several options out there, but the one I've been playing around with lately is Corona SDK. 

Corona SDK allows you to code in a simple scripting language called Lua and then deploy for IOS and Android.  For IOS you still need a Mac in the toolchain if you ever want to make a game that you're going to deploy to a device (rather than the simulator).  But at least you can develop on a PC.  For people who do love being on Macs and who love XCode and Objective C - more power to you all.  I just can't deal with it.

So my plan for the next few months is to continue cranking out stuff for my website but also try to gear up to do some android and ios development using Corona.

I've been reading a pretty interesting book about game design.  The book doesn't really get into the nuts and bolts of mobile game development from a programming perspective, but that's ok - I'm reading separate materials for that

Instead it delves into how to make a fun game that is unique and engages players.  The book is called The Art of Game Design : A Book of Lenses  and I'm about 2/3 of the way through reading it.

Sometimes I wonder whether people would be interested in an erotic BE adventure game.  Or FMG adventure game. I could certainly create one of those.  It wouldn't be possible to put them into the apple app store - they don't allow anything that even seems like porn in any way. But I wonder if in the jailbroken repositories - like Cydia - whether such a game could exist.  Or in the android marketplace or somewhere like that.

At any rate, the game development I've been thinking of doing is more mainstream than that (not involving adult erotica) but maybe I should look into that...

Sure would beat going to my day job. Sigh.  Well, I'm off to work now - hopefully will get some time to work on my websites later tonight