Where does the time go?

So my last post on this blog was the 1st of June 2017. It's disheartening to see I only posted twice last year however I found my first year of uni a little overwhelming. Since the last post I've completed my first year and I'm now four months away from completing my second and receiving a foundation degree. I'll definitely be doing the honours top-up to receive a full bachelors degree next year however the course I'm doing is heavily focused on video-game design with some programming involved. Over the past year and half I've realised that I much prefer programming over making games. 

With the industry moving towards making games in pre-made engines such as Unreal, Unity, CryEngine or their own in-house engines like RAGE and Snowdrop it would appear the art of programming a game from absolute scratch is a thing of the past. Sure you can but it's something that indie devs would do and if you're an indie dev (like I wanted to be) it's hard to complete a full game without the use of an engine like game maker whilst paying the bills. 

I've become a big fan of C and procedural programming as it follows how my brain works. I like to make lists and follow those lists; ticking one task off at a time. Object-Orientated programming is more than a little confusing to me as it jumps around all over the place. I recently just finished implementing a font class for my DirectX 11 engine and the amount of times I had to go back and change function declarations; create new functions or just redesign the entire thing entirely did my head in. Perhaps it just goes to show how weak my C++ skills are right now, I'm certainly more comfortable writing class interfaces now than I was a year ago. A year ago, trying to implement code from MSDN seemed impossible so perhaps I'm just being impatient with myself.

I've decided to do a masters degree in Computer Science once I've finished my bachelors as it's more geared towards data science, memory management and general programming which I'm much more interested in now. The past year of my degree has been filled with writing game design documents, researching mobile input methods and 3D modelling; the latter I detest with a passion. I'm also not a big fan of Unreal and I find it dissatisfying to have to use it constantly throughout my degree. I am however enjoying building my own engine using C++ and DirectX, there is just something about writing code and clicking the build button and it compiles with no issues.

I took this blog off google for while as I wondered if I should continue it, however I am determined to finish this book and his next one which is for more advanced C++ programmers. I will begin re-posting however at a slower pace as I have many deadlines looming. I would like to finish this book by the end of summer though. Thank you to everyone who drops by and I hope someone finds these posts helpful.