Archive for August, 2008

Doing a whole lot of nothing

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008

Another week, another blank Saturday, and what do I have to show for it? Nothing.I remember, before I had my job, I would spend the majority of my time coding my game engine. The engine that would get me a job. Each day was an opportunity to do something worthwhile, such as refactoring the entire particle system. But what I had back then - that I lack now, I think - is a clear goal. “Get a job” is one of those major life goals that I spent a lot of effort on, along with “get an education”, “move out”, etc. But I’m unsure what my goals are. Just doing my job isn’t enough. I’m beginning to realise that I have certain intellectual desires that are being unfulfilled, and for my sanity they need to be.At one point during the development of Destroy All Humans!, I almost quit my job to go to university - however I got too bogged down in work to really organise anything and just forgot about it. Perhaps that ended up being a good thing, but who knows that could have turned out.  I was a game programmer on both DAH games that Pandemic made, but without realising it was to my own detriment… I wasn’t getting the intellectual stimulation to keep me happy in that job and it got me into a rut.  Fortunately after that (the current project I am on) I moved over to engine programmer where I am much happier, yet I am not fully satisfied. I need more.Perhaps this line of work isn’t for me and I just want it too much to realise it. I think I could be building robots or other kinds of software and be happy, but I’m not willing to give up my job for it. So, what can I do? Well, I think that all I really need is to organise my hobby activities to actually make some progress on them, and thus satisfy myself. My first task, I guess, is to define what I want to do; what my goals are.