How To Make An RPG : Suckling Pig Update

2013 has been an interesting year so far, in January at Bigyama we were finishing our first Vita game, Quell memento, (out in April - check it out!) and by February we didn't have any more immediate work and we decided to take a break from for a while. By the February the 4th I was touching down in Denpasa, Bali and I'm still nearby in Ubud (though not for too much longer)!

I spent most of February playing tourist, which worked well out because on arrival in Bali, my laptop died and it took nearly a month to get it fixed! But I didn't just come for a holiday I also wanted to work on one of my programming projects. The project I decided to focus my efforts on is the "How To Make Your RPG" book and I think it's going pretty well so far, I've drafted out the contents and I'm slowly fleshing out the book. You can check out the book's website here (I'll be updating it early next month). I intend to self publish this book and I'll probably release a digital version first (pdf, epub and mobi) then later on a print copy.

My February and March office

This morning I took the long and somewhat dangerous walk into town, ate suckling pig and watched monkeys play around in the monkey forest. While I was walking around I decided I needed to return to parts of the book I've already written and rewrite them. This afternoon I've rewritten the camera code for looking around a 2d map for the third time which means I have to change all the  code examples after the camera is introduced and there are a lot!

So why would I do this and give myself so much extra work instead of getting on with the next part of the book?

>Was the code buggy?
No.

>Was it inefficient?
No.

I rewrote it because I didn't think it was simple enough; I want the readers of this book to be able to easily understand the code. I don't want the book to block their progress while they spend time figuring out exactly what the code's doing. Therefore I'm putting a lot of effort into making the code as simple and readable as possible. This might make my progress a little slower but I know the book will be better for it.

By the time I leave Bali at the end of this month I want a first section I can be proud of and that will really do justice to the reader.

If you want to be notified when the "How To Make An RPG" book is released you can sign-up to the mailing list here.