My goal is to continue to post little projects that may be of use to people in small ways. Little utilities that aren’t revolutionary, just functional tidbits that either produce something useful or increase productivity. I also want to release code that has the least restrictive license possible so you can feel free to copy the code line for line and not worry about attribution. Concern about licenses was one of my biggest headaches as a professional developer.
I want to help people. I’m not the best developer, but I am a good one. I invite questions and I also invite comments, recommendations for improvements.
All that being said. The biggest of my current projects is a retro action-adventure game in the spirit of the original Legend of Zelda (1986). I’ve developed games before for the mobile platforms in small groups of 2-4 people. This time I’m going it alone.
I’m writing it in Kotlin for Android. I don’t plan on selling it, just releasing it for free (free-free) no ads or micro-transactions. With these decisions made I feel less stress. I can work at my own pace and not worry about user expectations. The consumer gets what he gets and if he doesn’t like it he’s free to uninstall and there is no need for bad blood between us. This isn’t to say I plan on producing crap. I’m putting money into it, so I want it to look polished, but I’m not likely going to meet the standards of Zenonia.
The other big project I’m working on is my own compiler featuring my own language and syntax. I’ve been working on it for a couple weeks and I’m down to working on the code generation stage of development. It has actually been a fun project so far. I’d like to dedicate some of my posts to sharing what I’ve learned. Of course, this is all under the presumption that I’m able to finish (I will be).
There are a lot of steps involved that have nothing to do with the actual development of the compiler. Things like getting your environment perfect for development. Not to scare you off, but it took me 23 hours to build LLVM, and that was without Clang.
I hope some of you are willing to try it with me.