So the world, it seems, is conspiring to keep me from focusing on Captain Stretchy-Arms in a single, two-week long stretch. In fact, for the next two weeks, my time is going to keep being fragmented by real-life things.

Rather than keep banging my head against this, I am going to switch to doing something with a lower intensity for the next fortnight.

I did have the “big idea” that I could use this time to throw together a small game (or dust off one of my old ones) and try to port it to as many platforms as I can. The idea being to get some experience at porting that I can then use for Captain Stretchy-Arms and other games in the future.

Of course, you could replace the word “platform” with “iPhone” in the above paragraph and it would keep much of its meaning. I was very excited about developing games for the iPhone (using MonoTouch and XNATouch). That is, until Apple modified the developer agreement and banned non-Apple development tools (the article title says Flash is banned, but it also affects many other tools).

I may still work on cross-platform development – I also have an interest in porting to Silverlight (via SilverSprite) order to make games for the web. And there’s even some hope for iPhone – the current rumour is that Apple is not actually enforcing their ban.

But I may just decide to work on other bits of technology instead – improvements on Farseer Physics, refactoring bits of Dark so they can be reused, improving my overlay and line drawing system (seen in this prototype), and so on – things that I think will be useful in upcoming games. It really depends how I feel and how much time I end up having.

(Developer’s corner: By doing this I am violating the YAGNI principle. I know that this is not ideal. My hope is that by limiting the time, and being aware that I am doing it, I can limit the downside.)