NO! Of course not.
Lucky for me, one of those classes bogging me down is Game Development, wherein a team, armed to the teeth with ME, makes a game for a grade. The down side is that I don't have much say in the game design side of things. As such, this game will have a noticible lack of boobs and blood. The up side is that I get to do a lot of core systems coding, and that's pretty fun too.
The game is a tactical rpg ala Ogre Battle Tactics, and it has been coming along nicely. You can check out our project's SourceForge page here. I recommend that you do so. We haven't quite hit Alpha yet, but we are on target for getting there fairly soon.
This is my first time working on a game with a team (or any significant code project, for that matter). On the one hand, it blows having to go with somebody else's design. I mean it really sucks. It is totally killing me on the inside and bothers me to no end. On the other hand, it sure is great to have competant, talented artists on hand churning out content. For the first time ever, I don't have to worry about art assets at all. I can ask for a bit of art as needed, and a couple of days later I'll get it. Sweet.
The other good part about somebody else heading up the project is that there is some serious planning going on. Our team leader is a planning and documenting machine, which isn't 100% a great thing. In my experience, overplanning can be a waste of time; both because every minute you spend documenting is a minute you aren't spending on actually getting stuff implemented, and because on big projects like this things change ALL the time. Every time you hit a wall and it becomes clear that an idea isn't going to work well, all the stuff you planned that has anything to do with that idea has to be completely retooled. Me, I am more oriented towards just jumping in and getting dirty/getting stuff done, so if I was in charge there probably wouldn't be much of any planning at all.
In the end, I honestly think there is a kind of happy medium-ground between the two extremes, where stuff gets done in a practical sense according to some loose and flexible plan. Since I am the one implementing many of the big systems (and I approach the plans more as guides than as rules, pirates of the caribbean style), this is kind of happening naturally.
Other news: I've also started a new project of my own using a full fledged game framework (instead of starting from scratch with bare bones SDL or OpenGL). What this means is a lot less time monkeying around with stuff like timing and sprite animations, and a lot more time doing actual game code.
Miraculously, that project too is coming along quite briskly. I've mustered the will power to pump quite a few hours into it in just a week, and it'll hit something resembling a game with another 8 hours (hopeful programmer estimate which may be off by a factor of 10 hours or less).
Unfortunately, art is a problem as always. After about two hours of absolutely painstaking work, here is part of what I was able to pump out as the hero's sprite.
Meet your hero, the Necromancer:
What do you think? Usable, or no?
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