I haven't written here often, because it's stunningly difficult to write something worth reading; only more so when your thoughts are fleeting and your Internet access is sparse. However, just to affirm that I'm still alive and kicking, I'd like to share some stuff I've been up to and thinking about.
First is my new project: Tea. Tea is a simple 2D game development library for Ruby. It's made for the sort of grass-roots development that was popular with QBASIC back in its era. Tea is designed with simplicity in mind: 0 is better than 1, and 1 is better than 2, but at the same time, it won't avoid a valuable, convenient feature just because it can be built from other features. Graphics, input, sound and text are the pillars of Tea.
Tea is making slow but steady progress. Events have been blasted right through. Sound and text are waiting on graphics, and speaking of graphics, that has been a royal pain to deal with so far. Why? In the words of Joel Spolsky:
All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.
To demonstrate, I'll describe what I'm dealing with in the graphics subsystem of Tea. Tea is built largely on Ruby/SDL, which, surprise surprise, provides a Ruby-like flavouring to SDL.
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