Time and Money.
As always there never seems to be enough of either. Progress on Space Station Victor has been slow, I’ve made some code updates but nothing is really visually different or impressive. The way I see it the way to finding enough time to work on the game I can either wait for my children to be old enough to not require constant adult supervision, or I can do whatever I can to make a secondary income. At least $250 dollars a month so that I can finance extra babysitter time, that would give me four afternoon hours a week I could dedicate to game development, if I stay up late I could bump that up to 8 working hours and still get 6 hours of sleep. It’s not much, but it should be enough to make real progress.
So the question is where can I get an extra $250 dollars a month? I’m going to try a few things. Starting with:
Thrill All Humans: Robot Stream
Using a Robotic Process Automation tool like UIPath I can write an AI that plays a video game. If I pick a simple game and a create a very simple algorithm, I can finish one in 4-8 hours. The silence is the biggest problem, top tier gameplay is interesting, but if my AI is deliberately doing whatever is easy or making arbitrary decisions then it will need to rely on commentary to be entertaining. I should be able to use a text to speech tool like IBM’s Watson and UIPath to create something that observes events happening in the game and make commentary from a list of responses to various events as well as idle chatter that triggers periodically. I’m going to use free versions of both to throw together an experimental demo reel.