homebrew scene

I can assure you nobody who does development for the VB is in it for any compensation.

So the problem is you have a small community, which means a really small dev community, and I would say that the majority of the small dev community works full time, and quite possibly in grad school or an equivalent time drain.

For me, the past month has been like this…

Monday thru Thursday: leave house at 8AM for work, go straight from work to school, get home between 10 PM and 12 midnight.

Friday: Leave house at 8AM, get home around 6 to 6:30 PM. Fall asleep watching TV.

Saturday: Get up around noon, try to get caught up on school stuff, end up staying up until 3 or so working.

Sunday: Same as Saturday.

So you can see I didn’t even have time for my personal life. Everything was put on hold because I just didn’t have time.

Fortunately I am now done with school for this semester, but that doesn’t stop the large time drain called work. And the backlog of stuff I have put off. So by the time I get caught up with everything, I am sure school will be starting again.

I do plan on having a game out within the next few months. Will it happen? I don’t know, only time will tell. But I want to do it right so that I can release a complete game with fully commented source code along with state machine diagrams and such in order to show the full dev cycle.

Does that answer your question?

And the only reason a competition sparks a bunch of releases is because it gives a deadline, and without deadlines you will never get anything done.

Akumie, come on, be reasonable.
No need to repeat but i totally agree with whats been covered by these other fine busy fellas, get off ya own arse and have a go, or maybe donate 10 grand so someone can take time off their work so they can dev you a game!
Or leave the VB scene alone for 2 years, play on some other console forum, then come back and play the 2 new homebrew games that would be out by then.
Waiting and longing for something to happen but not doing anything more about it than moan is just sad, sorry to be like that but deal with it.

So please prove us all wrong and make the most stunning VB homebrew game ever.

Oh man, you know what would be great, if someone could develop some software like game maker in which we could develop our own vb games. It would sort of be how ms frontpage is to coding in html in notepad.

I feel the frustration of both sides.

On one hand the programmers do have lives and I know what it’s like to have to put things on hold. Your efforts are always appreciated for giving us something to see through those vb goggles. I also totally understand that you guys have the total right to be pissed when anyone whines about your spare time hobby.

On the other side I can totally see where Akumie is coming from. There is more development for calculators than there is for vb. hp49g even has zelda!! I would love to program a game myself and once I looked up the basics of vb programming and it was like looking at something written in a foreign language. Not even knowing basic programming sucks.

All I can say is that given my less than average artistic talent in graphics and music I still wouldn’t mind putting an effort into it, but getting it all to play nice and adding ai to it would add years to the project 🙁

VB development… hard? Well yeah, it does seem like that, when people tell you to go to the developer wiki and you have to read stuff like memory maps, chars, worlds, registers, interrupts, etc… ARGH! Just tell me how to make something, is what probably everyone thinks when they start looking for information.

I found KR155E’s tutorial very helpful, because it’s so well documented, it only tells you the basic stuff at a pace you can keep up with and encourages you to try exploring, along with the GoSub thread, and then there’s the forum so you can ask a question and have it answered by someone from our friendly little community.

You may hear that it’s good to go read a book about the C language before doing VB development. That may help, but… forget it, it takes forever. Try starting with some other programming language (ANY language will do). I personally did nothing but various dialects of BASIC (not that I think there’s anything wrong with that, I think BASIC’s a great language no matter what anyone says, it’s easy, it’s functional, it’s general-purpose, whatever) and some Pascal and some NewtonScript (the language of the Newton platform) and some language a friend of mine started making and I did documentation for him, blah blah blah, and my first hands-on encounter with C was right here, in the VB development scene. Once you become a programmer (understand the basic concepts of programming) you can basically move on to anything.

Don’t give up. Never. If you aren’t _interested_ in programming but still want to see new VB games, try your skills in story making, art, game design theory (that is planning how a game should work and play), testing, etc. You’ll make development of new games easier, I’m sure.

I have found it easier to have someone to team up with, you could take turns and work on the same project. Getting those kB of .vb code done requires many times more kB of code, even if you would just sit at the computer copying it all from a piece of paper – it takes a lot of time.

The game code is written in a programming language, C seems to be the easiest way to go since there are a lot of supporting software and finished code for that. It can be written in any text editor but programming software usually has supporting functions that makes it easier to handle the code, automatic indentation, nice color codes, spell checks, syntax check and so on. The C code is then run through software, one or several, to translate it into data that (in this case) the VB can handle directly in it’s processor – machine code.

If everything works and the result is what was expected – many times it’s not, we usually call it a bug, some are easy to detect and others will never be detected… Sometimes the translating software adds bugs to the code that you hadn’t even expected.

It’s a long process, if you’re a skilled and experienced programmer and used to the environment, know what tricks to use and what not to use you can achieve what you’re aiming for a lot quicker – it’s like learning a new language, if you’re good at it you can easily express what you mean, if you’re not that good at it it will take you a lot more time to get there if you ever do…

If you have tried programming, and know what needs to be done, know how much time it takes you would simply be impressed with all the software that has already been done.

Programming competitions are a fun way to lure unfinished projects out. Perhaps there should be a small voting fee that the winner gets next time something like that is arranged.