Recently, I decided to start Android Development. I’ve been putting it off for about 12 years with much regret.
The impetus to do this came from a recent road trip where I listened to Bill Gates’ Autobiography Code. In the book he talks about his childhood leading up to the early days after forming Microsoft. Through out the book there are several mentions of him coding, his thought process towards it, and how in some ways it brought him comfort.
My childhood experiences with programming were similar with the earliest memories of being at the computer counter at K-mart, and my older sister teaching me rudimentary BASIC. A few years would pass before I formally got to experience BASIC on a Commodore 64 in my 5th grade class. This was purely experimental and not part of the curriculum.
The next chapter in my programming adventure would come during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of highschool – the summer of 1992. I was able to obtain an IBM Compatible PC, a Tandy 2500 SX with an 80 meg hard drive, two megs of ram, with Windows 3.1 and DOS 5.0. DOS came with QBASIC, a watered down version of Quick BASIC that offered no compiler. Not having a compiler that could make executables squashed my hopes of ever publishing anything worth wild. But that would change the following summer when I’d obtain a copy of Borland Turbo PASCAL.
I purchased it at an Office Express store in Las Vegas and it came with a book and a VHS instruction tape. I immediately dove in and loved it. I was able to make real games, and experiment, and learn, and all the while become ostracized from my circle of friends who had no interest in computers, or in programming.
Next would come Visual C++, then C#, then JAVA, and then finally the summer of 2013 where I got ready to start programming for Android. But I got side-tracked with a project in Atari BASIC. Then I got married, then had another kid, and then like most people, life happened and I never got back to it.
But listening to Code, inspired me to learn it again. The digital book I bought back in 2013 was grossly outdated and would have to start fresh with new learning materials. A lot had changed since 2013, which YouTube videos, free tutorials and more now available at my fingertips.
Now that I am at this juncture, what kind of app(s) do I plan on making exactly? Well, games mostly. I have an idea for a cross between Double Dragon and Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest). In a sense, an RPG with a beat ’em up theme, but still holding on to a traditional RPG combat system. As with many great game ideas, feature creep had set in even before I wrote the first few lines of code, and when I took the first few Android lessons I found its going to take an enormous effort, to get this game idea off the ground. I may be 12 years behind, but I will catch up fast.
And with that, I’ll post my updates here, both for the Android Development, and for the upcoming game.