…gives me reason to play old games, get new books, buy movies for “research purposes”. So addictive. And useful too (at least sometimes).
Now if only tax-man would agree with me that these really are company expenses.
You ever fall into this trap of hoarding “research material” for your game?
I started coding games when I was a small kid with access to Commodore 64.
hermitC: "I’m happy that old gameplay styles prove their worth in modern times. With Grimrock Almost Human brought an awesome game to the market. Nevertheless..." 32 days 2 hours ago. 
Ashiq: "Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. I thought games like this went down since the early or mid 1990s." 32 days 5 hours ago. 
josh: "My favorite code advice is “if you need something >3 times, make it a function/object. Otherwise, re-code it inline.” Without this rule, I 1)..." 39 days 8 hours ago. 
Matt: "Hi Thomas, Nice points. I especially love the image of an army of Tamagotchi. I mean, running the supply chain for an army is really no different to Diner Dash..." 48 days 7 hours ago. 
Thomas Morgner: "The good part about games is, that they have a rather simple world. Drinks, for example, can all basically be the same thing. Add slight variations..." 48 days 22 hours ago. Matt: "Nice conversation :) about stuff I love talking about! Programming the base needs for every creation that has motivations is a lengthy task. Unless you provide..." 49 days 14 hours ago. 
Juuso: "Excellent points, that’s exactly how it needs to go. You can apply the same stuff to very many things, and there can be consequences too. Let’s say..." 49 days 14 hours ago. Thomas Morgner: "I don’t believe that you have to create a full scale AI to make a believable world. Its more about covering the basics, and working with the..." 52 days 6 hours ago. 
I am so guilty of this. I usually by books, games and movies way before I have started a project and most of the time they end up unused because I start something else…
Of course. Nowadays it’s more collecting libraries and source code from the net (which goes mostly unused), but there are a number of books I bought out of the same reason. At least I have learned some things from reading them.
Guilty as charged =) That is how I justified pre-ordering Overgrowth. (Our games don’t have much of anything to do with each other, they just use the same UI tech as us XD)
~David
Ahh, David – so you were researching for the “user interface usability and experience”.
Understandable.
o:)
Well, sort-of. I was looking around for alternative UI systems. I wanted something similar to HTML and CSS because they work good for designing stuff like that. I stumbled onto Wolfire’s website through Frictional Games and got interested in their tech; eventually I found out about their UI system using Google Chromium to render HTML5+CSS3 web pages and yeah…
Expense it dude. Stick it on your accounts. I put games, consoles, TV, cables, lunch with Helen etc on my accounts. It’s valid. Worst case you get audited (rare) and they disagree and you say “oops I did realise”.
Hope your tax man won’t read about this shenanigan! ;)