During the past month I’ve made the most progress on a game I’ve been itching to create than I have for the better part of a year. I can attribute my “spurt” in getting results happening on the project, based on taking a step back from what I was doing before and making some tough but necessary decisions.

The crux of my initial slow progress, was mostly due to my investment and belief that higher level language development would be my “silver bullet” vs. potential deployment platform(s) along with the assumption that this solution path would give me more time to invest in actual game content and game play, rather than plodding through the lower level codebase.

I was convinced that even though I had a healthy background in C++, the “future” of running a successful indie business would rely on C# or Java, both of which are extremely fun to develop in, and both of which I have enough experience with to actually use productively. Then something funny happened on the way to making my game…

I realized that even with the power and flexibility that higher level languages offer, it’s still a lot of actual work to get the moving targets of a game working together in harmony!

During my evaluation period, I was finding that it would take me *roughly* the same amount of time to develop similar functioning game code across all three languages, despite the unwritten promise that higher level = RAD = less “work”.

So if the development time is roughly the same across each language, then the impact of the end-user usage ended up being my determining factor.

Gee…what a concept.

I’m finally able to get back to the “game company stuff” and spend more time with it. Most of the weekend was going back and evaluating what I was working on before my small break, and the realization that I was just tackling a project too large for both my current budget and my time. So I’ve reset the clock and come up with an idea that I should be able to prototype this week. *cross fingers*