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Message: 5998

Author: andrewbroad

Date: 20/12/2006

Subject: Re: Andrew's backlog / Flash MM / Specialisation

 

[Re: Various things to various people from Daniel]

Daniel wrote:

2. To Andrew Broad

Due to real-life commitments and tennis-distractions of
unforeseen magnitude, my MM/JSW activities have been severely
curtailed, and I have almost 500 unread emails!

That's a HUGE amount! Do they all concern MM/JSW?

No - the MM/JSW emails are mainly messages from this Group. As of
now, I have processed up to Message 5950. In other words, the MM/JSW
backlog is less than 10% of my total email-backlog. The rest is
mainly tennis.

How is the processing going?

Well, today I finally managed another cut at my email-backlog, and
managed to get it BACK DOWN to 500!

Unfortunately for MM/JSW, I am still allowing tennis to claim the
lion's share of my time. The 2006 season may be over, but I have a
huge backlog of match-reports to write up, where I spend many hours
of each day analysing every point as intricately and precisely as a
game of chess.

That's what makes me unique - my compulsion for thoroughness.

But it doesn't half eat up my time! Yes, it bugs me that AMJT is on
hold, and to see another calendar-year pass without the gamma-release
of a Broadsoft-game (Ma jolie SE was, I suppose, a delta-release).

I have thought very seriously about giving up writing my tennis-
reports, but that thought makes me deeply unhappy, so I'm not going
to do it until I get a job (which would almost certainly spell the
end of my MM/JSW-editing career anyway).

My passion for tennis is about the same as my passion for MM/JSW, but
tennis demands a lot more of my time to keep up with it - especially
when my players do as well as they did this year, generating so much
work for me!

I'm working manically to clear my tennis-backlog before January's
Australian Open, so that I can free up some time for MM/JSW between
February and May. But it's inevitable that there's going to be a
significant overspill - I plan to work on that part-time in February,
and if the Australian Open generates as much work for me as it did
this year, I would expect to be free of the growing backlog by April
2007.

And then I plan to resume work on AMJT until my whole tennis-cycle
begins again at the end of May - assuming that I will not have found
employment by then.

Congratulations on your Flash Manic Miner records :-) . I can see
that jogo76 has just taken the lead again.

Cavern 26 already? Drat! I don't have time for a serious assault on
Cavern 25 for some time...

Does it mean you already know how you will spend your free time
during the holiday season? :-)

I know pretty much exactly what I will be doing every day of my life
until the end of January, and even beyond. I'm on a very tight
schedule with about three days' slack...

And who is jogo76 anyway? Is he (she?) a Group member?

I suspect jogo76 is the same person as rap75 - my previous rival for
the #1 spot in Flash MM. I've no idea whether that person has a
presence in this Group, or whether it's someone we know.

What amazes me most is the degree to which one might want to
specialise. I've been into MM/JSW very intensely for the last
two-and-a-half years, devoting most of my spare time to it.
I would love to play other games, such as Boulder Dash, which
evidently is very exciting to some of the Group members, and
hundreds of other fantastic games out there (Spectrum and
non-Spectrum), but I can't do it, because if I dedicate time to
them, I will have no time for JSW.

I play other (non-MM/JSW) games casually from time to time, but
nowhere near the breadth and depth to which I played them before I
was into tennis and the Internet. I've got a briefcase full of old
maps and lists that I made for Spectrum-games.

Nowadays I keep abreast with Miniclip.com (Acid Factory is
essentially Manic Miner in 3D, with a gun), and have also been
dabbling lately in chess - I sure hope that doesn't become one of
my /obsessive/ interests! ;-)

I have never even tried to design a MM or JSW64 game yet, and I
know that if I take up this challenge, it will take me a long time
to first learn to work with them in JSWED (even though JSWED is
intuitive and user-friendly), and then to learn all the tricks
that make a game interesting. So designing /MM and JSW games/ for
the Spectrum sometimes seems too large a field to me. Designing MM
games only could be just enough if you want to produce top-quality
results.

I have found the skills required to write MM and JSW games to be very
much interchangeable. There's a massive overlap between the game-
mechanics, including most of the quirky features.

JSW64 is a bit harder if one wishes to make full use of the new
technology in terms of drawing new cell-graphics, writing patch-
vectors and so on. AMJT is very much simplified by the fact that it
reuses cell-graphics and patch-vectors to avoid unnecessary variety
which may confuse the trainee player.

Igor Makovsky wrote:

...and I have almost 500 unread emails!

- And one of them is mine, I suppose.

If you're referring to your email of 27th September 2006, its current
status is "read and flagged for a response". And I have added what
you asked me to do to my (very long) to-do list.

I apologise to all concerned for my lack of replying to emails - it
bothers me deeply that I have a backlog of emails-waiting-for-a-reply
stretching back to 2000, but I can't achieve the priorities of my
life by replying to a lot of emails.

I didn't know that Andrew doesn't have a job, I thought that such
a highly educated man like our Andrew has a very good one.

Unfortunately (well, /fortunately/ for the MM/JSW scene), even a PhD
in Computer Science isn't a passport to a job! Especially when the
requirements of both parties are so specialised.

--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/

 

 

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