Long year, new Resolutions

It's been almost ten crazy months since I've posted this. I've graduated, visited my ancestral homeland, moved back home, and landed a job as a computer science teacher at a local community college. I've read Ayn Rand's masterstroke Atlas Shrugged and come to see objectivism as a philosophy which tells you it is not a shame to be good at what you do or proud of it, as long as you don't exploit yourself or others to do it. I've toyed with intermediate XNA tutorials, but I'm still not quite proficient enough to make game programming a career instead of a hobby. I had let my projects sit empty for months, not wanting to make games just to impress someone else. I was feeling burned out before I had even really started.

It was about a week ago that I discovered this game called Cave Story. It's a modern throwback to 8-bit 2D side scrollers from the 80's and 90's. It may seem strange by western standards, since it was developed in Japan, but it maintains it's own style and identity in a field where imitation is more common than innovation. The remarkable thing is that it was created by just one guy and it shows more polish than games with one-hundred developers. yes, I know it was developed over the course of 5 years, which some considered an epoch by technological standards. I know it is much easier to make a 2d game than a 3d game. Somehow the game still casts a large shadow over the industry as a whole. It says that the creative power of an individual is more important the the collective ability of a group. As a rugged individualist and someone intrigued by Objectivism, the game means a great deal to me. It inspires me to get out of my lethargy and develop my own games.