It has always been my intention that 2006 would be the year that I start thinking seriously about indie game development, and now that's it's here I still believe that it is best that I aim to sell a game this year. After thinking about my current skillset, I've realised that my business skills are the main weak spot in my skill set, and I hope to work on that this year. Having a glance at all the top indie games from 2005 over the last week, I think that all I really need to make a good game is a top-notch design and the business and planning skills to make it happen.
However, I've hit a slight delay right at the start of 2006. I was going to spend a lot of the next few days typing up some plans and trying out some of the indie demos I collected while I had access to a good internet connection in Melbourne, but now I have to make a change in plan. Unfortunately when I arrived back here in Canberra, I installed a memory upgrade that I got as a present into my computer. Once I switched my machine on, the disheartening smell of burning silicon told me that I've got some expensive repair work to do. I've burnt out the new memory chip and most likely my motherboard too, so now I'm computerless for a few days. Given that my computer is now three years old, and was budget when I bought it, it's probably time to upgrade anyway. It's just such a pain to have to go through the whole rigamarole of talking to different salesmen to get a decent cheap computer.
Actually, if anyone has any advice on what hardware I should be looking for, I'd like to read it. I'm a bit out of date on what the latest hardware specifications are. I'm probably going to get another low-end system (I don't see any point in spending top dollar on a computer that will halve in price in half a year, and I'm saving up for an Apple laptop in a few months so I don't want to spend too much of that money), but I still want it to be suitable for development work and reasonable gaming (where "reasonable" means looks decent and runs constantly over 30 FPS). Hopefully my Radeon 9700 Pro survived whatever happened to my computer, and the network card is probably salvagable, as is the DVD and CD burner drives. If I keep my (now almost ancient) monitor, keyboard, mouse etc., and can transfer my copy of Windows XP across to the new computer, it should be quite cheap. However, any advice on CPUs, motherboards, memory etc. would be welcome, as I've got no idea what's been available over the last three years.
