Around the time I was finishing high school and starting college, I was getting to know a friend of Scott's named Kyle. He was a really creative guy — at the time, he was making awesome film score-like music he called Crashterpiece Theater. Sometime around my first year of college, we fell out of touch. He was on my buddy list the whole time, but for some reason we just never spoke.

Last week I noticed his away message contained a link to a little mini-game (more of a toy, really) he'd written called Big Vine. I tried it out and really liked it — very Tim Burton-esque. I messaged him to say so, and as we talked, I learned that he's now a game developer working at Maxis/EA Games — he worked on The Sims. I checked out his website and discovered that he's got all kinds of interesting projects under his belt. Unsurprising, really — it seems like a natural progression from the talented Kyle I knew back in high school.

The interesting thing, though, is that he's really into short, simple, rapid-prototype games not much more complicated than Big Vine. He runs a website called Experimental Gameplay aimed at fostering that type of thing, where people can post small games they've written, and others can play them and comment. His user page on the site contains several of these small games that he's written. I tried them, and they're all surprisingly fun.

As I played these games, and talked with him about game development, I started getting inspired to try again to get into it myself. I've always wanted to learn to write games, and I've tried several times to start learning, but it's not easy and I never managed to get a foothold before getting distracted and pursuing some other interest. I took a virtual reality class my last semester at Clemson, but I hadn't taken any of the prerequisites, so most of it went over my head. But these conversations with Kyle were making it sound much more feasible. Because I'd already had some exposure to OpenGL in that VR class, the idea now sounded much less daunting.

In a fit of coincidence, it turned out that the Experimental Gameplay website was about to launch a competition — they announced a theme on April 1 ('consumption'), and you have two weeks to develop a game based on that theme. The entries are judged, and the best one gets a paid summer internship at a game studio.

I decided to give it a shot. I doubt very much that I'll actually be able to get something done in time (considering the fact that I have to learn the basic skills pretty much from scratch as I go, a speed programming competition is one of the last things I should be trying :). But that's OK, because I don't really have any interest in a summer internship right now anyway. It just seemed like something concrete to focus on, rather than flailing about at random.

I mentioned all of this to Jing-Ta, and he sounded interested too. He helped me flesh out my game idea, and we discussed several of his own. I believe he's also going to try to put something together for the competition. I hope he does — all of his ideas actually sounded really cool, and I'd love to see them become a reality.

As for my game, as expected, it's coming along slowly. I keep getting stuck and spending five or six hours trying to figure out some basic aspect of graphical programming that has nothing to do with this game in specific. Considering the fact that half of the competition period is already over and I'm still working on the basic game mechanics, it's looking pretty certain that I won't have mine done in time. But I think my idea could be fun if I can get it to work the way I'm envisioning it in my head, so I'm not going to stop working on it just because I can't submit it to the competition.