A new beginning

It's been a long time between updates, and even longer between coding updates.. much has happened in my life as well.

Work over the last year and a half swallowed my life. More was expected from me in less time, as the company I worked for crumbled away - as did my home life.

Suffice to say I had to pack up my Amiga and other passtimes and knuckle under to try and weather the storm... I've since moved on - in every way possible. I've left Las Vegas for the quiet life of a small country town in Georgia, I've left my job in video production to pursue my home business.. A new life, and soon a new wife, and a little one on the way.

It agrees with me, and although I've not gotten everything in order to a point where I can spend a LOT of time programming (when you work for yourself, the more you work the more you can make - so for now that has a lot of appeal) I can at least get things rolling once more.

Looking back over my code I see the good, the bad, and the ugly. After 15 years since I worked on the original game (which was a constant itself a year and a half passtime of learning and exploring back in the day) my hopes to reach the same level of understanding over the course of months were perhaps shooting a little high... To do EVA justice requires a level of elegance and complexity I've not yet achieved. To retrace my steps I have to go back to basics again and work my way up.. EVA is not getting canned, its being put on the backburner while I learn aknew. There are many things that I'm not yet proficient enough at, and there is too much going on in EVA to learn everything required in one hit. Several times already I've had to rewrite much code again and again because I'd done something either wrong, or not well enough.

A new project is being started - one much simpler with less to concentrate on... I've chosen the old arcade game 'Scramble' (one I spent many 20c coins on in my youth) - it has a fairly simple setup (on the surface of it) .

One main ship (3 lives)
A scrolling landscape (1 speed and constant in one direction)
firing launches bullets (1 pixel dots) and bombs.
Fuel runs out - and can be topped up by firing at fuel depots

Each level has a single enemy type - missiles, saucers,meteors, and a maze at the end.

Touch anything, you die...

Simpler than most games - and a good place to start to get routines built for scrolling, collisions, pixel plotting, scoring, and fuel bars.

I still haven't unpacked and tested my old Amiga 2000 yet - but I have a WinUAE setup identical to it - hopefully I can start on most the things here, then cross it over at a later date to be cleaned up and tested.

I feel good about this - my life is at a point where I can enjoy the journey, and I'm with someone that at least understands my passions :)

Atm I'm devoting weekend time to this project (along with housechores and other 'man work') so my updates should be weekly on Sundays - cheers!