On Losing Control...

I'm still contemplating creating an Android game (or even just a quick "Hello, World!" to get my feet wet) to try out on my Kindle Fire. If I get a little more time I might even start that tonight. But a month or so ago I bought the e-book Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide (which yes, I am reading on the Fire) to get a feel for UDK UnrealScript programming. At first, I was thinking it's pretty cool. I mean, you get to learn about some of the classes in UDK and in a matter of minutes you can have an Unreal-style game up and running. What I'm struggling with, however... is what feels like a total loss of control.

With XNA development, where I had to do everything, I could do exactly that: just about anything. Of course, the ability to do anything came at a heavy price: lots of complex or ground-breaking code with minimal assistance from our favorite search engines. I still recall the horror that was getting the simplest model animations to work in XNA 3.1 because of the lack of animation support out-of-the-box. But I digress.

I just have to say, in this as-yet unfamiliar world of UDK UnrealScript programming it feels weird writing script "classes" and not having full control over how things work. But maybe I just haven't learned enough yet. I have only completed about 40% of the book anyway. We'll see where that leads, but for now I start again at the beginning of every programmer's journey.... Hello, World!