Paradise Deferred (Redux)

Bah, this game programming lark is a royal pain in the cojones. I've been trying to motivate myself to finish that godawful sideways scrolling shoot 'em up that I've been rattling on about for, oh, months now but I have been seriously struggling... sadly, the "can't be arsed" factor is hideously enormous, exacerbated by the huge number of fiddly little bastard details that always need to be attended to before making real progress. I've actually somehow got a fair old bit of the infrastructure well in place but there always seems to be something else that needs properly designed, and it's always something that hadn't been previously accounted for... and, frankly, after spending most of my 9-5 workday ploughing through acres of ill-considered, back-of-the-fag-packet designed shit intricately planned, well-architectured, high quality code, I'm not always in the best frame of mind to spend the evenings or weekends peeing away my precious drinking time doing similar into the wee small hours. Not when there's a third series of Deadwood to be watched...

Aha, I hear you cry, the big sh**bag is making his excuses and baling out already - what a complete Colin Hunt. Well, naw, that ain't the case... not at all. The sideways scrolling job will get finished at some point, maybe even this summer... but my new years resolution was really based around just getting a game written in Python with a view to subsequently getting it running on Linux as well as Windows... and then going on and seeing about getting it running in an OLPC development environment. Well, that project is still very much on, only I've retrospectively decided to walk before running (er, actually after trying to run in the first place but bollocks to pedantry) and have started converting my old "classic" Columns rip-off to Python / PyGame from the original Delphi / DirectX version. A much less technically onerous endeavour as well as a pretty damn fun way to really get into the guts of the new language without fighting it quite so much at every bleedin' step (e.g. cursing stupid things like the lack of basic, multi-dimensional arrays in the standard Python library the other day - WTF ?!?). In fact, it's going to be a cool wee proggy to hang any graphical and musical doodlings from in the way that I'd originally intended the Delphi version to become. Well, I've started so I'll finish as old Magnus used to say. This thing will definitely get done. I've said so in public. So there :-P

In the meantime, here's a picture of one of the models for a putative end of level baddie from that wannabe R-Type / Gradius clone to keep y'all satisfied. It was going to be a picture of another (partially) furry German but the big man thought better of violating the old Blogger terms of service. Ho-hum.


Made with the help of -

The Byrds "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" - Oh, how old Uncle Mex loves the sound of some steel guitar on a Sunday morning. Glorious. Gram Parsons R.I.P.