Games have a love-hate thing for me.  I hate them when I want to work but feel compelled to play them.  However, I love them when I am actually programming them.  Programming is where I came from.  I did it as a means of living for 12 years.

But that wasn’t game programming.  That was business programming.  I still do find a lot of fascination trying to solve business-related problems with an elegant solution.  However, it isn’t what I do now full-time.  My full-time job is writing now.  So hence the blog.

In my off-time I still like to dabble in programming, but now it’s all centered around games.  A few months ago I hit up Retro Remakes, a primarily British site devoted to old games.  After looking around I decided to get back into making games on the side.  Then I found one of the subdomains, Cymon’s Games.

Cymon’s Games is devoted to reviving the type-in and modernizing it.  Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (in the 1970s and early 1980s), magazines and books were put out devoted to the amateur programmer typing in programs from source code printed in them.  The primary language was BASIC.

Nowadays the type-ins on Cymon’s Games are written in C.  It’s a great way for a beginner to get into learning about not just programing but also games.  It’s also a bit of a shameless plug for my own conversion I contributed for Star Merchant.  I think things like this are worthwhile for those who want to learn programming, especially in a tried and true language like C, which is used even to this day in multitudes of programs and operating systems.

In the coming weeks I’ll be making a page specifically for my own work-in-progress, Perils of Pothril.  It started out as a quick roguelike, but it’s developed into something a lot more.

Oh, and if you’re a programmer that would like to contribute to Cymon’s Games, please don’t hesitate to hit up Joe Larson for more information.