Game Engines

There's a funny thing about me and projects... I tend to get about half way into them before I figure out what I needed to know at the outset.  Just the nature of the beast, I suppose - and this project has been no exception.

I figured out (way too recently) that the game development book I'm reading is really just laying out a game engine from scratch - and explaining it poorly along the way.  I could use that game engine as a starting point in developing my own games, but it turns out there are several other game engines out there - some of them for free - that have great documentation and are much more intuitive.  In particular, Sparrow seems to be a good option, and I'm reading up on that now.  I'll still finish the book, but I doubt that I'll use much of it in developing my own apps.

I also figured out that I could have dug into an engine like Sparrow quite a while ago, having just learned the basics of Objective-C, but I'm glad that I spent as much time as I did on C and Objective-C, and even the basics of Cocoa Touch and general iOS development stuff.  I think that the extra background will pay dividends when I get to the point where I really want to control what I'm developing.

I'm trying to be patient as I work through what I'm hoping will be the last few weeks of research before I can start producing simple apps... but I'm really eager to dig in and start making stuff.  Hopefully soon!