Status of the Project @2023-12-26

Hello everyone.

It has been a while since I've last written one of these posts. The project is absolutely not dead, but I'm having a really difficult time adding content.

What happened

In a few words: a lot.

I have been able to push small updates silently through butler, mostly spellchecking and small additions, until October, then a lot of things happened.

I caught Covid, recovered from Covid in about 3 weeks, there have been other family health-related problems that lasted for about another month which really stressed me out and as soon as everything was settled, my body gave out and I got sick again for about 3 more weeks. All of this while trying to keep on working my day job.

At the end of all this, I lost 10 kilos (about 22 lbs for the people on the other side of the pond) just from stress. It has been rough.

What's going to happen

There will be a spike in workload for the first months of 2024 on my day job, so I can't promise any updates on the book, but if stars align and the conditions are just right, I may be able to push an update or two.

There will be a change in how the book is distributed, all the epub channels will most probably be phased out and merged with the mainline editions (so you'll get both the PDF and EPub versions in the same download).

Also there will be a new release channel that will allow you to download all editions (both PDF and EPub) at once.

Random Ideas

Here comes the part where I just throw ideas to the wall and see what sticks. I'm thinking of changing how the book is structured to shorten the time between someone starting the book and the first line of code they write (as of now, there are over 170 pages before we start talking about "Game Loops").

Ideas include splitting the book in a "proper book" (with all algorithms and tricks) and a "reference book" (where all the math and the academic-inclined stuff is stored), or just change the order of chapters.

I have been thinking about translations in other languages, as well as writing a couple editions that cover real libraries and engines (I know PyGame and SFML) but I don't want this book to become a competitor to Pygame 4000 which brings funds to the amazing PyGame library, while SFML requires a bit of revising on my side.

I have also thought of making a survey asking various questions to the community and anyone interested, to understand how to steer the project towards a direction that gives the most benefit to everyone. I'm looking for a privacy-focused way to do surveys (and I don't have an instance of NextCloud of my own) but I'll probably be forced to use Google Forms. We'll see.

Conclusion

This post's main purpose is to inform everyone that the project is still alive, I'm just having a hard time in general.

Hopefully 2024 brings about more opportunities for me to add to content, or maybe it will bring some good souls to help, who knows.

I hope 2024 brings you all joy and happiness. Take care of yourselves everyone.

Thanks again for reading these ramblings of mine.

Penaz.