About
It all started one day while sitting around and wondering why I was bored at my current computer programming job. I soon realized that I seriously needed to get out in the real gaming community, and to do that I needed something to separate myself from the millions of others seeking the job. I have always had complete confidence in my programming abilities, and am sure that I could hang with the big boys and their big games, but all that is just talk if I can’t back it up. To prove to myself, and to anyone who might have doubts, I decided to write a full scale game of my own, a Real Time Strategy (RTS) game, The Chosen.
I have always welcomed a good challenge, but this time I wanted more than that. I wanted to push myself to new heights and achieve new goals well above any other in my league. As I decided on an RTS, I made a list off all the major programming techniques that I didn’t know or didn’t know well enough, that I wanted to implement into the new game. First on the list was pathfinding, which I had some experience with but not enough to brag about or to be confident with. Next came artificial intelligence with its package of fuzzy logic, hierarchical goals, and complex multi-tasking. I also wanted to include an efficient, optimized, graphics engine that could handle thousands of objects on the screen at one time. If that wasn’t hard enough by its self, I also wanted to write the entire game and the administrator controls on a custom scripting engine that would allow the end user to customize just about any part of the game. Getting ahead of my self, I will also write the code for the administrator controls to allow non programmers to modify pictures, unit attributes, maps, the GUI, and even some game variables within reason, with all of their changes saved as a custom version. To finish it off, I also wanted to make this RTS playable over the Internet with anyone else in the world, via a socket connection to a server of mine running custom server side code that will backup all game data using a Java database client (JDBC).
With the official start date of Dec. 04 2007, I plan on having most ground work done, and a single player version with minimal A.I. up and working within a year. While all the coding will be done by me, I have recruited a few to help out with artwork, sounds, and general design. Hopefully, there will be no major delays, and while maintaining a 40 hour work week, I will still have enough time and energy to meet the deadline. I know this is a massive project, but I also know that I will enjoy every step of the progress as The Chosen slowly rise from the source code and prove my talent for programming. “I realized that my prior projects were just finger warm-ups. Now I have to tackle complexity itself”, John Carmack.