Is it 5 yet? Is it 5 yet? How about now?

Today I had the worst "damnit why isn't it 5 yet" feeling all day at work. Mostly because the hardware/software the customer gave us to test STILL does not work, nor are we sure if it has ever worked in the particular configuration we are using. As you'd imagine its very hard to test something, or even write a test harness for something, that doesn't even work on its own.

Besides that, the other thing I need to do is write a small IDE for the QE people to write test scripts with. Unfortunately I've done very little GUI programming and what I have done was long enough ago that things have changed so much that I'd have to spend time (that I don't have, since this tool was supposed to be finished already) learning the new ways of Java/.NET.

Thus I'm using VB6 since it's so simple you could never forget how to use it. But really, Visual Basic is the DEVIL. I like to think I write very clean C++/Java code, but I'd never ever let anybody see my VB code without the preface that the tool is an afterthought and completely hacked together.



Being summer I have much less to do, so I end up reading GameDev more, and then this journal causes me to read other peoples journals. Consequently I'm feeling the drive to make some kind of game again. I'm trying to work in the following things into a good game idea:

• I love Civ4 and Gal. Civ. 2 but they take way too long to play through a game, I'd like something on a much much smaller scale that you can play in an hour.
  
  Side Note: If anybody recalls, I remember some game that was a turn based strategy set in Egypt, I never played it but it mentioned being playable in like 30 minutes or so. It wasn't a big title, if you know what I'm talking about leave a comment because I can't find it anywhere
  
  
• I've gotten very interested in scripting lately. I'm using Lua at work, and I'd like to explore using some kind of powerful scripting language as a means for writing most of the game content.
  
• Something where the art is minimal. I am nooooo artist at all except for possibly things like a GUI overlay. Obviously some art is going to be required but I'm going to keep it 2D so my programmer art won't be too hideous.
  

This may or may not come to fruition, but it's definitely something I'm going to be reading about and letting sit on the back-burner in my brain for the next week or two.

Oh! and one more thing. Someone mentioned Z specification in a comment on my first post. I have an interesting story about why formal methods can never be sufficient for testing software, and the story involves planes going really fast, so stay tuned!