For the longest time I haven't been able to finish anything that even vaguely resembles a Flash animation, I have some serious concentration and motivational issues. Every time I start something I end up throwing it away because it no longer matches the level of quality I'm aiming for. Animating takes a shitload of time and discipline, and therefore I take my hat off once more for people like Adam Philips, RobsH66 (4 years?!), Luis etc. etc. who have enough patience and skill to finish their work and still make it look kick-ass. One of the hardest parts of animating, and I suppose art in general, is that you have to be able to look beyond what's drawn on your canvas right now and see what it can become. I unfortunately lack that skill. Therefore I've decided to stop trying completely. I've found a new hobby in (at least trying to) developing games.

I prefer programming over animating because with programming your work is divided in 'blocks' whilst with animating your work is more 'layered'. In animation you firstly write some sort of script, after that you draw a storyboard (if you're working on a larger project that is), after that you'll probably draw some rough frames, wireframe your character animations, finish the background art, finalize the characters, and after all that there'll probably be some finishing touches, details, shadowing, texturing etc. left to be done. My main gripe with animation is that only after that last step your hard work actually looks good. It takes a creative soul to be able to see what your rough draft or wireframes could turn into. Maybe I'm not as creative as I thought.

Anyway with programming, the work is divided into blocks, today you figure out how to make your character walk, tomorrow you'll try to make him shoot etc. Every time you finish such a chunk of code/work is just incredibly rewarding. You see results from your hard work much faster than you would when you're animating a movie. It's this advantage that made me fall in love with programming. I might not be very good at it yet, but I'm willing to spend a few years to get better.

In september I've finished my first game ever, which didn't even do that bad in the portal. I'm about to release number two, which got sponsored for way more money than I ever thought possible, I have another christmas themed game ready to be released in December, and I still have plenty of ideas and motivation to make more (penning down my next game whilst thinking about what to type next). I'm a very happy guy at the moment.

So yeah, respect for all animators.

Also, longest post by me, ever.