I am a capable of being a successful programmer.

Maybe after 7+ years of development time on multi-million dollar applications with teams ranging in size from 2 developers to 40+ developers I would have figured that out already.

I hadn’t though.

I’ve always had confidence issues, and that didn’t change when it came to development and programming.

There has never been a situation in my career where I couldn’t figure something out. Maybe I’m a little weak in certain areas of development (game development comes to mind), but I can’t say that I’ve ever truly failed to grasp a programming concept.

I’m notoriously bad at “talking tech” to the point that I once failed to answer the question “What is the Session?” in an ASP.Net interview. This was after having spent 4 years doing ASP 3.0 and ASP.Net development. My nerves are a killer in interviews that is for sure.

However, with the time I spent unemployed and trying out all these new technologies and programming languages, I learned a little bit about myself. I learned that I have the ability to succeed. I don’t think I’ll ever be the type of developer that will argue over memory allocation and worry about which bits are flipped by which bytes, but working in so many different languages has really helped me progress.

I look forward to learning more languages and continuing to work with new technologies. I’m very interested in learning Python and becoming a “script kiddie” all over again.

What follows is my actual review of the game and my short experience with it.

The system used to run this game was a Windows XP virtual machine running under Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard).
The Virtual Machine stats are as follows:
Memory: 1.5gigs
Processor: Dual-Core 2.1ghz
Video: 12mb onboard video card

The first problem that I noted with the game was while running the installer.
During the 3rd part of the install, while the installer was downloading the necessary files my machine lost internet connection. When the internet connection was resumed, the installer would not recognize the connection even though Firefox and Internet Explorer both connected to the internet just fine. I closed and restarted the installer and began the process again. The files began downloading from the beginning (i.e. they did not resume where they left off).

My initial impression of the game was that it had good art and style. I enjoyed the overall feel of it. It also felt like the game didn’t take itself too seriously. The character “Theophilos” was referred to as “Phil” and I found this amusing. One of the characters also referred to Socrates as a “P.I.T.A.” or a “Pain In The Ass”, however, even though the game took itself lightly it still took the time to get interesting points about history and historical figures across to the player.

After accepting the first quest I was told to talk to Plato at the Gymnasium in Athens. I was not aware that I wasn’t in Athens already (I was in Thebes) so I spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to talk to Plato while I was in the Gynmasium in Thebes. I thought the game could have done a slightly better job of informing me that I wasn’t in Athens. The title “Thebes” didn’t stand out to me on the top of the screen enough.

I did find it very helpful that there was a “?” located over any building that was relevant to my current quest. For example, once I arrived in Athens it was easy to see that there was a difference about the Gymnasium building and that it was relevant to me in some way.

While playing through the game I did have a fatal error happen which caused the application to crash.

Steps leading to the crash:
– I was in the main Athens screen
– I saved my game progress (for the first time)
– I pressed the “Set Sail” button
– When the game went to a loading screen I pressed “alt + tab” to switch to a different program
– I heard a stutter in the game sound effects and then the game crashed

There was no error reported from the application at all, just the crash.

When I ran the game launcher again the demo said that I had “48 minutes” remaining. Since I had originally launched the game twice, the second time at “59 minutes” (the first time I launched the game I realized my sound was turned off) this meant that the game had crashed 11 minutes later. It did make me wonder whether this was a known bug since the timing fell in line with your directions of playing the game “for at least 10 minutes”.

The game could use a few minor improvements from what I noticed. I have already mentioned that the fact that I was in Thebes but needed to go to Athens was not automatically clear. I’m sure once the game progressed on this information would be easier to understand though.

I found that when in the map screen used to “Set Sail”, if I hovered my mouse pointer over a city, information would pop up about that city. However, I didn’t discover this “pop-up” until I had already visited each city available. I happened to leave the mouse pointer over a city while reading something else and discovered the “pop-up” information. I find that it’s not good to have players accidentally discover portions of a game that are meant to be helpful to them.

In order for a player to complete a quest, at least the first quest, it felt like there was quite a large amount of going back and forth between the same few buildings. This “back and forth” work was necessary to complete the quest, but it felt like nothing more than “busy work” in order to expand the gameplay time.

The last improvement I would suggest would be the inclusion of keyboard navigation. When moving around within the game I felt that I could save time and move through the game more fluidly with the keyboard than with the mouse. Simple keyboard navigation like the spacebar or “enter” key advancing the conversation or the “escape” key leaving a conversation or building or the arrow keys navigating between options within a building.

Overall I felt that the game was well done. The style was distinct and interesting and the gameplay would hold my interest.

I have been primarily a .Net Developer for my entire career. I have worked with C-Based languages, but mainly that was c#, which is quite advanced as far as C-Based languages go.
What I am finding the most difficult though are the things that feel a tad archaic to me. For example, nearly every language I’ve ever worked with used the period key “.” to access methods and properties of an object. It’s very strange for me have to access those items by placing the item within a set of brackets.

For those that aren’t aware, in c# where you might type something like:

in Objective-C it would be:

That isn’t the only place where Objective-C feels strange though. For one thing, the language is so descriptive that it makes me feel uncomfortable at times with how much information I’m seeing in method and property names. For example: numberOfRowsInSection, viewDidLoad, viewDidUnload, didReceiveMemoryWarning and more.

Something about the way that Objective-C deals with naming conventions feels right, but so different from what I’m used to seeing. Maybe I just haven’t been seeing properly written code before this. Who knows.

The biggest hurdle though?

Pointers.

Apparently I come from a cushy programming world where memory management is handled for me. I understand memory management (if you aren’t using it anymore, get rid of it) but I am not quite sure where all the pitfalls of pointers are quite yet, nor what all the syntax to do with them means. I NEED to understand WHY things happen before I fully understand what I’m doing.

I’m currently working on the excellent series of iPhone tutorials over at iCodeBlog.com. I highly recommend them.

I’m a huge fan of TextMate, it’s one of the only apps that I’ve ever been glad I’ve paid for. It’s not an IDE per se, but I find that my productivity just increases when I use it. There are free versions of software similar to TextMate, but none of them have ever worked quite right for me. TextMate is just so easy to modify and change to my specific needs and is so bloat-free that there just aren’t too many distractions.

I find that TextMate fits all of my programming needs. Every single language I have ever tried to work in, I have used TextMate for. Everything from Ruby on Rails, PHP, C#, ASP.Net, VB.Net, HTML, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, Java and more.

I am even making this post straight from TextMate.

I am a keyboard oriented programmer. The less I have to take my hands of the keyboard the better. With TextMate I can be inside of any file and hit Alt+Ctrl+Cmd+B (my own shortcut) and create a new blog post. After I finish writing it, I hit Ctrl+Cmd+P and it publishes straight to my blog.

How easy is that?

I recommend any programmers out there with a Mac, fork over the cash for TextMate. The programmer of it, Allan Odgaard seems like a great guy and has been working on TextMate 2 on his own for a while now, but has promised that all of those who purchased TextMate 1 would receive TextMate 2 for free.