Been wasting too much time . . .

playing video games.

Basically, I have become an MMO junkie.  I used to be all about FPS games.  This was okay.  Sure, I played a lot . . . probably too much . . . but those games are easy to get up and walk away from.

However, at some point, I got turned onto World of Warcraft.  I am sure most of you have heard about it.  World of Warcrack.  The problem with these games is that you ARE your character in the world.  If you are not doing something in the world, someone else is and you are “falling behind.”  Falling behind in what?  I am not sure, exactly, as it is just a game.  It is hard for that reason, for me at least, to not play.  I don’t want to end up too far behind and end up getting left behind.

I had a break at one point, when my gf got into medical school down in NY.  I quit my job and picked up and moved with her.  I canceled my account and then, during the move, had no internet.  Of course, I expected to get internet right away.  However, Verizon (as I am sure many of you know) sucks hard core.

Basically, the summation of the anecdote (of the anecdote) is that they changed the way they put things into the system the day I signed up.  The guy I signed up with “didn’t get the memo.”  So I got lost in the system.  Long story short, after being sent around to about 15 different people in 5 different departments over 5 weeks of calling almost daily. . .I finally got in touch with someone who wasn’t clueless:

“Man, it is a good thing you called us.  If you hadn’t, you would have been sitting in cyber-nowhere-land forever.”

“Uh, I have been calling for weeks about this and you are the first person who caught this.”

“That’s odd, it should have been pretty obvious to anyone who had access to your account.”

/facepalm

But anyway, back to the point.  For that period I didn’t play and decided to just quit.  Played a lot of BF2142 during that period.  However, I got sucked back in because, honestly, I missed it.

Now, I wanted a change.  I have an idea in my head about what is going to make a good MMO.  Actually, it really isn’t as much about the whole MMO than it is about the combat system.  I keep hoping a new MMO is going to come out with what I want.  However, it has yet to happen and it doesn’t look like it is going to happen anytime soon.

So what I decided today is that I have been wasting too much time playing video games and I should actually try to develop one myself.

Considering I have very limited programming experience and zero game development experience AND zero 3D ANYTHING experience (minus the real world, of course), this is probably an insane undertaking.  But I am going to try it anyway.  I will try and “recruit” a couple of friends.  Llama I know will be into it and will probably want to help. . .err. . .take over the development.  But that is a good thing.  Julian will probably want to help out, but in a more artistic sense.  Maybe his gf would be into helping as well.

I don’t know, I have to figure out where to start first.

But this is good.  Even if I fail at ever even producing a game, it will get me using my creative juices again, instead of just wasting my creativity playing a game that does all the creating for me.  And I am not just talking about from a development standpoint, but an artistic one.  I was once an “artist” . . .well, it is probably more accurate to say that I once had good artistic technical skill that I have allowed to just fall to the wayside.

But anyway, that is where I stand now.  Going to try and develop a game.

Wish me luck.

Actually, hold me, I am a little scared.