I recently decided to try Virtools to prototype my team's next game and it was one day it hit me: I was actually having fun making games again. Several of my programmer friends have mentioned to me before about how tedious making a game can be. There can easily be 5 to 10 man years of work involved in getting an entire game engine, tools, pipeline, etc, ready. Many of them also played around with web programming, generally for their personal webpage and they mentioned how much fun it was since feedback was immediate. You'd edit a few lines of code, press refresh on the browser and see if the result was what you expected.

Well, that is how I felt while using Virtools. What makes it so cool, so fun, is you are editing the game WHILE IT IS RUNNING! Some companies and middleware have systems were you can edit a few things while the game is running, tweak a few variables, adjust a few links but that's about as far as they get. In Virtools you can adjust everything INCLUDING THE CODE while the game is running!

The time it really donned on me how cool Virtools is was while I was running the game I added an entire radar system and edited the code for computing the positions of the dots on the radar in real time. My formulas were a little bit off at first so I adjusted them, pressed compile and that function was recompiled WHILE THE GAME WAS RUNNING and the dots on my radar responded immediately until I got it right. This is the power of Virtools!