What? An Update? What? WHAT?!?

The last post on this blog was about a year and a half ago. That's roughly the amount of time that elapsed since I last worked on Rustbot. Why is that, you may ask, when I showed such passion and vigor for this project previously? What could have come up that would cause me to delay so?

Well, quite frankly I got tired of engine work. I'd spent years retreading the same problems, the same challenges and with not a whole lot to show for it. So the enormity of the task wound up overwhelming me (as it repeatedly has), and I abandoned the project (as I repeatedly have).

A couple weeks ago I was doing some coding for work and the bug bit me again. So, naturally, my mind wandered to Rustbot and what could be (as it repeatedly has). But I didn't get any farther than that because, once I thought again about the engine development, I was immediately turned off. But then one of my friends mentioned Unity to me. I was, of course, aware of Unity, but I'd internally derided it over my perceived simplicity of its interface. I felt that it made game-making too easy, and some warped sense of elitism made me think that, if you couldn't build your game from the ground up, you didn't deserve to make a game.

Turns out I'm full of crap.

I downloaded Unity 4 and followed a few tutorials to get myself acquainted with it. By golly if it isn't the smash-darnedest best tool an indie game developer could ever want. In a matter of a couple days, I created and accomplished more with Unity than I had in my years of Rustbot engine development. Bluntly, I love it.

I love it because, with it, I can focus on actual gameplay as opposed to figuring out how best to write my object hierarchy class. I can focus on level and character design instead of how to handle object collisions. I can work on a game instead of working on an engine. It's liberating, and it's breathed fresh life into a project I thought I was done with. I feel like there's legitimate hope for the game to be made.

Granted, I have my gripes with it (I wish certain OpenGL commands were unlocked, or that there were a simpler way to render modes for selective objects). But I'm of the mind that limitations breed creativity, and so I'm sure I'll conjure some ideas for certain methods.

Anyways, that's all I have to say for now.

[Cue Dan Aykroyd "We're back!", followed by Run DMC's Ghostbusters theme]