I am so restless lately in my programming. You'd think 8 hours a day of it at work, 5 days a week, would turn me off on doing the same thing in my spare time. But no, it doesn't. Instead, I've become enthusiastic from the things I've learned at work, and when I go home I try to apply them to my projects. The problem is, there isn't just one project on the table.
I received requests to finish Bwock, a puzzle-pusher game in the style of Adventures of Lolo. I really, really need to get that done. But something else has also nabbed my attention, folks - something much bigger. Something that could potentially get my name OUT there, and get vasilisagames.com some serious hits. I wish I wasn't doing it alone, but if it works then I may not have to in the future.
I'll say a few things. It's going to be open source, Java, and similar in some ways to a popular project called "Inform". It's for interactive fiction, but it's so flexible that even I'm not sure what it's limits are yet, and I only have the basic engine partially done. I've had to create my own scripting language for the thing, which was some of the best fun I've had behind a keyboard. I think people will like the simplicity of it.
I'm debating the license for it, but currently it's documented as MIT, which means it's ultra free. This could potentially mean a big company can modify it into their own program and sell it, but they couldn't stop anyone else from doing the same thing. I might switch the core to LGPL, if I can make it work with java correctly, and let interfaces be MIT so that the project itself can't just be yanked out from under me. I'm still thinking.
I'm not a huge fan of java, but it's really great for open source. Every platform can run the exact same file, it generates beautiful javadocs, etc. Besides, this is not a process-heavy program - no heavy math, no polygons, no massive data trees. Its just text parsing... with a twist ;)
And now lunch is over, so I'm getting back to work. Fare thee well.
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