I’m up to nine workable digits again. My finger doesn’t seem to be badly injured, but the joints have swollen up as it heals. I no longer need to splint it to my ring finger, but the swelling means I can’t flex the finger for a while. With my middle finger stuck in an extended position it makes it a fair bit harder to grip anything, but it also makes certain gestures a lot easier.

I’m back to typing at a reasonable speed with my operational fingers, but annoyingly I can’t grip a pen or pencil properly and mightn’t be able to for a few more days. I hadn’t realised how much I rely on being able to jot things down. I can type things up I guess, but it’s just doesn’t have the same flexibility and immediacy as pencil on paper. Still, there’s a lot of typing I need to be doing at the moment, so it can be considered a benefit that my actions are somewhat limited to being in front of a keyboard.

On the game development front, I’m slowly working my way through Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation - Making Things Move, gaining speed now I can use both sides of the keyboard. I haven’t got much further than the first introductory exercises, but my current impression is that application development in Flash is uncannily like the methodology I was already using in my games; a heavily event and object based approach.

I’ve also been doing a little planning ahead, and I’m realising that I’m not going to have a lot of time for hobbies in the next six months. I’ve got an awful lot of work I need to do to wrap up my Ph.D. research. As such, the priority for my hobbies must shift towards keeping me sane. This doesn’t mean I’ll be stopping game development, as I regard that as one of my favourite pastimes. But it does mean I need to be realistic about my goals; I can’t really work on anything too large in the next few months.

As a consequence, I’m thinking the best aim for me is to continue working on learning Flash and Illustrator, with the aim of working on little mini-games for the next few months. Flash should be ideal for making small games, and I won’t get stuck in debugging engines. It should be a nice break from prototyping algorithms in C++ for my research and writing up results.