Kick-off

Hello everyone!  This blog has been created to keep any interested people updated on my progress in designing and coding the game Dark Matter.  This game is a turn-based strategy game set in space, similar in some ways to the Master of Orion, Galactic Civilizations, or Space Empires franchises.  I intend for the game's mechanics to differ somewhat from these mainstream games, though I'm not going to reveal exactly how until I've made much more progress coding.  Please also note that Dark Matter is a working title only and the real game's name will be different (since there is already an actual PC game named Dark Matter!).

I've been designing this game for several years now in an on-again off-again fashion and have come to the point where I need to get serious about coding it.  Designing on paper can only get me so far and the whole exercise starts to feel circular after the fourth revision of my tech tree...

I have a programming background, but its unfortunately in scientific/numerical methods and analysis--Matlab and C.  This means that I've had to teach myself object-oriented programming over the past few years.  I think I'm at a point where I can start coding Dark Matter now.  I'm going to write the game in Java using the Eclipse IDE and will probably use Java Monkey Engine 3 as an underlying engine for the game, with additional coding and game design help from Mike McShaffry's "Game Coding Complete, 3rd Edition."