Postponing Game Development

Finally, after finally having a bit of free time I've decided to change my focus to enhancing my knowledge in some deeper topics. Instead of spending time on small projects, I feel I should expand my general knowledge  in a couple of areas.

Firstly, I want to explore Gradle to see if I can leverage it for projects and get myself some more knowledge on serious build systems (I was also considering ANT but for the time being I think Gradle would be a wiser choice.) It will also be fun to play around with a little bit of Groovy. I would like to learn how to set it up for non-trivial projects (i.e. libGDX) but also allow me to easily create deployments for each platform. I've been manually doing deployments for a while and I do know how to do it, but it comes to a point where I should be able to automate it and never have to worry about it much again.

Secondly, I really want to expand my knowledge in the computer graphics area. It really fascinates me and more importantly I can see it being extremely rewarding now that I've had a decent taste of some more advanced topics. Rendering is pretty awesome, especially to get some realistic looking images, but I want to dig more into some of the more advanced interactive programming. This will focus mostly on 'desktop' graphics as being so constrained with mobile isn't exactly satisfying. Especially to play around with advanced lighting/particles/fluids and explore geometry and tessellation shaders. Maybe AMD (ATI) will get its act together and work on first-class compute shaders for even more fun, but I'm sure it will simply mean I need a newer graphics card (rolls eyes).

Thirdly, I need to expand my knowledge in machine learning and artificial intelligence. I have a few bits and pieces of basic knowledge from games and a bit from other sources, but nothing substantial that will help me in the next couple years. I am going to need a solid foundation before the end of the summer; otherwise, I will deeply be regretting it and I would rather not make my life stressful if I can avoid it. The advantage of digging into this area is that I will be able to directly transfer my knowledge into other projects and games.

Lastly, I have a couple of other high priority events I need to worry about, contests/personal events/etc. Thus, I want to keep things off of my plate for the time being until the dust has settled.