Time to Develop

No, I haven't started yet, but from my previous post I thought I'd outline some of the constraints I'm working with to give some better context. They boil down to time and money.

Time
Phone me up at any time and chances are you'll catch me either at work, looking after my children, or asleep, sometimes all three. In any case, I'll be grumpy.

Take a throw at the dartboard of my life, and you'll have to be in the big points. There's the double-top of evenings when I'm not doing something else, or the treble-top, very special occasions when I actually get an afternoon or morning to myself (like now - the family are at a friends house, hence the posting binge) . Any greater length of time would be the elusive quadruple top.

This means that I have to be able to pick up work again quickly, possibly after a very long period of inactivity.

What I'm looking for then is the absolute minimum of administration and fuss, not even 'just a bit', none at all. Once something is set up, it needs to stay set up.

Familiarity is also of great concern, as I can barely remember the controls for Tetris for more than a week, so don't expect me to remember your keyboard shortcuts, handy application.

I will also need code that's as clear as a windowpane, so when I come back to it I don't have to spend an hour just trying to understand the crazy world of my previous self. Fortunately, after many years of wishing to be able to go back in time and assassinate my former self, this is how I program anyway.

Money
As time is money, apparently no time is no money. No money is what I have to spend on this project. Actually, that's not strictly true. What I have is hobby money, which is a lot less than company money. For example, I'd gladly use Slickedit to speed up my editing if it was £30, but as it's £200 it can whistle, and I'll waste a months worth of free time setting Visual Studio up to use the right buttons instead, providing my own whistling. Surely it's worth buying it to save those evenings? No, because it's not like I can use the time saved to actually generate £200. If I could do paid overtime on demand, it might be different, but it isn't. Sorry.

So there we go, I've no time or money to make my game, and I'm hopefully going to show how this can be to my advantage, but best not hold your breath waiting for it to come out, eh.