Monday, June 18, 2012

100th post

You know I was going to hold off on a 100th post till I had more done, but life gets in the way and so does myself. I do however have things to share.

 One weekend when I couldn't get anything done a friend made a bad joke involving anime and dungeon diving and I took it to an extreme and made a prototype battle system in about two and a half hours just to see if I could. I was quite happy with myself and realized that I've been getting wrapped up in the large picture and over complicating my projects which should come as no surprise. Though I learned a lot, after all I got this running in 2 and a half hours and it fully works for what it is. Used a lot of philosophies learned from my other projects and improved on the mistakes there to make something small and entertaining. Then I made the item mixing system I always wanted to test as a side note and an odd floor viewing system.

It was really fun and not the general look at my mountain of code and see just a lot of work and breaking things to get it to work. Mostly because everything was self contained and not constantly building of each other while these things could feasibly be layered on each other which is generally how games work. So this got me to thinking about Legend and RPGroguelike as well as my friends (now plural) games I've been tinkering with.

Long short I need to rewrite a lot of things and break what I have. Not completely throw away everything, I think some of my character storage formats and other things are workable, it's just that I have them poorly formatted to what seems to be my general programing style. Short focused bursts that accomplish something without having to debug something else midway through to get it to work. It may be kinda crappy and kinda unprofessional but that's the way I work on my own fun things. I've spent enough time proving I can debug a single program for 8 hours for the majority of a week and make slow but somewhat noticeable progress and my own projects are suppose to be what I enjoy doing. So I'm going to do just that, break my projects up into smaller more manageable components and live on a philosophy of "if I can't add a chunk on my lunch break I need to make the goal smaller".

So none of my projects are dead, but I'm eyeing up better ways to construct them so I don't end up back at this monumental roadblock that keeps me from doing anything. I've already refactored my friends GUI system and am quite happy with how much easier it is. So more of a learning experience. Hopefully I'll have something to show later, may not be any time soon though. RPGrougelike is quite on my mind with how well my friends joke of an idea got done, but I may have to do more tinkering before anything comes out of it.

1 comment: