Code Justin

Archive for January, 2010

One thing I have been doing lately is under estimating the size of my projects.  For instance, One of my blog readers/e-pals has been talking to me about creating a flash music store for indie artists that want to sell their music online.  Well not really thinking about it I had assumed it wouldn’t take me that long to create a music store.  Little did I know how badly I underestimated the time it takes to create a good back-end user interface.

I started on the MP3 store months ago but just recently started working on it often and once I got to the admin panel I started to see how much longer it would actually take me to make the store.  Feeling almost defeated and a little bit embarrassed that I had seriously underestimated the work required to create a store I chose to put the project on hold.  One of the pressuring factors is the fact I really feel like I need to get my butt in gear and start in the kids avatar chat if I want to reach semi-commercial quality soon.

I’m not giving up on the store, in fact I hope to return to the project as an even better programmer and create a serious good music store one day.  I’m a bit thankful that I took the time to stumble onto my mistake this early.  By seeing how badly I underestimated the work required to create the store it has showed me that my own goals for the mmo I’m making are still WAY out of my reach.  By realizing this I have come to terms with setting my own goals for my mmo a lot lower.

Right now I’m putting all my energy into creating the best kids avatar chat I possibly can.  I know that I will one day make the avatar chat into a full virtual world but first I need to make the chat!  So starting tonight I’m going back and looking at all my code to refresh my brain and make a few more comments.

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I will be the first to admit that I have put very little effort into my kids virtual world/chat over the past few months due to a few different reasons but more recently it is mainly due to a pure lack of motivation.

I have been having some doubts about whether or not to pursue making a kids game.  I’m a little bit worried by the fact that kids already have very established titles to chose from like club penguin or any one of the other dozens of kid avatar chats.

I was thinking about creating a virtual world but for senior citizens… which seems ok but my art style just does not fit the bill.  I could not imagine an 80 year old man playing an online game with very cartoony graphics.

I had thought about making a kids mmorpg (with combat ect…) but the amount of resources needed just to get the game into public beta is fairly insane for one person.  The combat system and all the art assets alone might take me all summer.

So thinking very realistically and working with what I have (my two hands) I’ve decided that my first idea of making a kids virtual WORLD is still my best option.  I could start out as a kid safe avatar chat then try to build users while adding in new features/mini games.  This would be my ‘fastest’ route for development speed since I can draw the art assets at a decent speed and I already started laying the foundation for an avatar chat and already have a few dozen art assets made up.

I want to start laying some concrete goals for myself so I can stay on track because time is running out really fast.  I want to have this game up and running with paid users before I head off to college in the fall.  So I will need to get a working/playable beta out before summer starts.

Even for a medium sized development team that seems fairly unrealistic but looking at what I want to accomplish I think that the kids avatar chat will be the best way for me to create an online world and secure a good financial future for myself while I’m in college.

As I’ve been doing for weeks I have been thinking about which direction to pursue… I’ve found myself wasting boat loads of time I could be spending on development just doing other non-productive things.

So to be firm with myself I’m publicly discussing my goals so that I feel a little more apt to stick to them.  I’ve been in a bit of a development slump lately but I’m ready to climb right out.  Starting today I’m setting my first real goal which will be to STOP worrying about other ideas for virtual worlds and just focus on my kids chat.  I keep trying to convince myself that another idea might be better or even bring more joy to the development process but I know that the safest/fastest route for me to create a successful virtual world will be to start as small as I can and the kids chat seems to fit the bill.

Wow even as I type this post I’m having second thoughts about what type of virtual world to make.  It is really starting to bug me how unconfident I am about choosing one idea for a virtual world over another.

As of right now I’m going to try and stop thinking about my other mmo ideas and put my confidence into the kids chat.  Once I do actually convince myself that the kids chat is my best option I think that my motivation/dedication will pick back up again.

So the first goal for my kids chat is to be confident in my decision to pursue the kids chat over other ideas in my head.

If you want to follow the development of my kids chat you can subscribe to my blog for updates!

One of my other ‘passions’ besides programming is investing.  Though I don’t have a lot of money to play with I do love learning about investing.  When I first turned 18 I took the money I got and started learning about the Foreign Exchange Market (Forex).  Just like programming you must first learn what half the words mean!  So after learning the key terms of Forex I quickly took off and started learning a lot of technical trading.  I lost what little I invested (I used high leverage plus Forex is very risky in nature).  After that I entered into a ‘play money’ contest which the goal was to see who could make more money trading Forex in one week given 100k play money.  I won the contest and got a free $200 account (which is double what I first invested).  So I did technically make back what I first invested.

I have not traded Forex in MONTHS (over 6 months) but something is telling me to get back into it.  I’m thinking about taking $100 or so and just playing around with a very small micro-lot broker.

I do not know much about other markets but I do know that Forex can be a very fun challenge for technical minded people.  For myself I just love finding patterns and predicting the future based on the technical indicators I have and developing my own trading strategy.  If I didn’t like computer science so much I probably would become a broker.

If you guys are interested I could even post some Forex how-to’s for programmers.

As I hinted to in my last post I’m working on my first commercial product.  One of my ‘life goals’ has been to create an mmo (massively multiplayer online game).  My desire to create a mmorpg is what lead to my journey into programming.  That was around 5 years ago and I’m finally to the point now of feeling confident enough to create a ‘basic’ online game.

Over the past few months I have been learning more and more about client-server logic/programming.  After much personal debate as to what kind of game to make I settled on creating a virtual world for kids.  One of the main things holding me back from trying a different type of game is my art ability.  Knowing that the only thing I can draw remotely well is childish cartoony graphics I decided to play off that art style and venture into making a kids mmo.

I’m not one to just blurt out such a big goal publicly without first having the very basics done.  Starting back in October I’ve been creating my own binary socket server in Python.  I know that there are already various solutions available but I wanted the experience in creating my own socket server.  As of right now the server is fully non-blocking and is working well but I have only done limited testing on it.

I haven’t worked on the client side of my game in over a month because I’ve been debating between making a kids game or another type of game but due to the fact I do not have any money to hire an artist I’ve decided to keep pursuing my idea for a kids mmo.

I don’t want to spill any details about the game yet because nothing is written in stone but the main concept/plan is laid out so that I will first create a basic avatar chat then build an entire world around that chat.  There will be absolutely no violence in the game and the targeted age group will be kids still in elementary school.

Below is a screenshot of my current testing environment, it might give you a better idea of my poor art skills.  Of course it’s safe to assume the game will probably look nothing like this.  Also note that the UI was just set up quickly for testing purposes.  The little ball is a prototype of what the avatars will look like and that lady bug looking thing is the cursor.

I will have much more details about the game later so if you care to follow the development I encourage you to subscribe to my blog!