Never, ever, ever...

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Kruell
Posts: 254
Joined: Thu May 26, 2016 10:35 pm

Never, ever, ever...

Postby Kruell » Mon May 21, 2018 1:52 am

code your own game.

I just went back and looked at the Alura code from 2006. It was written in VB and relied heavily on modules and ini (txt) files. We had 10 races with unique classes for each race for a total of 100 classes... each with different abilities... all "supposedly" balanced once they hit max level. Then I began to think about the meaning behind it all....

It was a flashback to the 1980s when I was first learning to code on this entity known as the internet.... It was a bracing time. HTML wasn't invented yet and browsers were years in the future. Cobol was king, Basic was dead, and I was on the cutting edge creating new games and cool programs like converters that told you what degree Celsius it was when you typed in Fahrenheit and simple games that worked like stories as you chose a path forward. The computer systems I was using became obsolete though and I had to move away from the cassette driven computers to something new... floppy disk drives.

With these new creations I moved into learning Pascal and Visual Basic. Since I was in college by this time, and Microsoft had created a GUI for their DOS system, I was learning a new programing language every semester. Each semester the professor would tell us "this is the next big thing" for us to learn. Only briefly would they mention C or Basic since those languages were decades old and definitely part of the past, a thing to be scorned. Then the big one hit us... Netscape, the first browser that standardized the language and moved computing away from Unix for good and into the demon Microsoft's war with Apple.

I didn't give up though. I took a couple of years off to work for a living (and earn tuition, my parents aren't rich). I came back and it was a whole new world. There were new languages yet again to learn such as ZPL and Coldfusion. We even had a class that switched mid semester from Coldfusion to Java... just because Sun Microsystems looked cool to our professor. I flew through my lessons and learned not one, not two, but half a dozen programming languages over a two year stint trying to finish my degree.

It was during this time while I was writing a DOOR Game that something hit me. My world was shattered. I was a broken husk of a man left reeling from the revelation that struck me out of the blue one night while inputting code for an ASCII character to attack another ASCII character over distance.... The code I was implementing was a variation on Basic. I had spent 10 years of my life learning computer skills only to have come full circle and returned to the simple "if/then" world of ancient computer languages. This was more than I could handle.

I left the computer world behind. I was stung by the betrayal of my professors, the corporate giants who worked to make our work obsolete before we could complete it, and the perfidy of the internet gods. I abandoned my precious computers and fled into a life of customer service, criminal justice, and law... okay, and some booze. My years in higher education seemed wasted as I had discovered that I was in a race to run back to where it all began. Yes folks, the old computer languages held over as legacies from the 1970s were destined to rise like a phoenix or a vampire to rule over the computer world of the future. I had been an unwitting slave to it's evolution... caught up and discarded in the craze of finding something more efficient than simplicity.

My self exile from the computer world would last for nearly another decade before I found myself being thrown into learning HTML Version 3. Life had thrown me a curve by putting me in a line of work where I had to not only learn this new version of an old language again. I was also put into a position of having to oversee the dreaded coders who were now slaves to their computers. My understanding of the precursors allowed me to debug code and work miracles of compatibility adjustments. Before I knew it... I was captured by the machine overlords and my mind was no longer my own.

Others found me in the cyber dunes of the internet and pulled me into their orbits. I found myself revived and coding like mad. I believed I had found a pathway through the cyber chaos. Visual Basic .NET framework was all I needed to focus on to align the deviations of computer code work into one unifying language. My quest had finally taken me to the other side of the coding nightmare and I saw daylight at the end as I worked to code a game that was complex, modular, and desired in the world!

Yeah... that didn't work out very well. My vision of a unified code base shattered as Microsoft cracked under the weight of it's own sanctimonious need to be the ONE. The very thing that I thought would allow for a "universal code" turned out to sabotage my efforts. The .NET framework was ultimately unstable. I had backed the wrong horse. My colleagues and friends who had gone the route of C were about to go further, faster than I could relying on the cross dependencies of the .NET framework. Visual Basic was good enough for simple things, but was inferior to C (C++ actually) when making interactive software.

Now I sit here, 30 years removed from the start... looking back through the scraps of code I've compiled over the years. Sure, at the time it was good work. The projects had their problems but they worked and functioned the way they were intended... most of the time. Still, I had to come to a self realization that hurt. By looking at those clips of old code I now can see the problems inherent in the system and the systemic fractures in the code base that created instability and holes for exploitation.

In short, my work sucked. Nothing of the old code is salvageable. Alura, my largest creation, can't even run on modern computers since the dependencies were removed. Sure, I could force register DLLs and other venerable files that are obsolete to make the program run... but at what cost. Yes, the computer gods have passed me by with their tortuous demands for an ever expanding understanding of coding overviews. Each year still, a dozen new computer languages are paraded out... all based on the original languages but just shined up for the cool kids. Most will be dead ends that won't last long enough to finish a project. And here I sit... in the dark... wearing only a cock ring.

Well it's time for me to drop my bottle of wine into the garbage and go to bed. Good night everyone and I hope you feel a little better about yourselves having read of my misery and failure.

Oh, and kudos to whoever can figure out the comment about the ring. That one is real retro :popcorn:
If you look like prey you will be eaten

Terron
Posts: 802
Joined: Sat Jan 14, 2017 11:36 pm

Re: Never, ever, ever...

Postby Terron » Mon May 21, 2018 3:09 am

pump up the volume :D
"Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go into the same box"

this game is like sim ant
zerg the red ants with more black ants

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Lateralus
Posts: 932
Joined: Wed Apr 20, 2016 2:21 pm

Re: Never, ever, ever...

Postby Lateralus » Mon May 21, 2018 12:20 pm

I wouldn’t say it’s all a total loss and I wouldn’t suggest that people don’t try to make their own games but I would suggest that developers consider all aspects of being a developer especially when they are doing it on their own.

Sounds like even tho things didn’t pan out totally on your projects you got a lot of exp and prob made some good connections. I know my first attempts at games were even worse than what you described. My first Vb literally had everything hardcoded haha.

Since then my code hasn’t gotten a ton better but the other aspects of development is what’s allowed me to make a good enough living off of it for the last 5 years to do it full time and travel the world while doing so.

If I could suggest anything to people who want to start making a game here is a list of importance or atleast what allowed me to succeed.

Have a plan/goal:
What’s your plan for this game is it a hobby? Something for fun? Great that’s all good but it’s a totally diff plan than anything that’s meant to bring in revenue. Yes they can overlap but it’s a totally diff business plan and your going to create more work for yourself. Something else to keep in mind is even if it is a hobby you are still going to have costs so plan on either using your money or generating some revenue to stay even.

Business plan:
If this is a revenue generating game your game needs to be built around that plain and simple building a free game and hoping to run into some money at some point is not practical at all and 99% of the time is not going to work.

Stay in scope:
This is maybe the biggest problem for new developers. They say hey I’m going to start with something small and they don’t set a scope 2-3 years later you got the sprawling game with 10 parts that are about 75% done and nothing’s complete. On this note I really wouldn’t start with an online game as your first game unless it’s very very small in scope. Online games have soo much more to them, the security alone not even considering a game that deals with payments is Huge.


Honestly I’d say most developers never even complete a product and that’s why i suggest such a small scope just getting something under your belt published out is a great confidence builder even if it’s very simple.


Now everyone’s got their own strengths and weaknesses and it’s good to stick to them but you gotta have all aspects to be successful. Just keep in mind it all counts coding interface art sound music story etc. just because you don’t care about an aspect doesn’t mean it’s not important to your customers.

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Kruell
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Joined: Thu May 26, 2016 10:35 pm

Re: Never, ever, ever...

Postby Kruell » Mon May 21, 2018 3:52 pm

Terron wrote:pump up the volume :D


Talk Hard!
If you look like prey you will be eaten

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Kruell
Posts: 254
Joined: Thu May 26, 2016 10:35 pm

Re: Never, ever, ever...

Postby Kruell » Mon May 21, 2018 5:04 pm

I would advise everyone to also know your limitations. Some people are great at certain aspects of coding while they have issues with others. Creating forms (building clients) takes a different skill set than server side work. I can't build a client. I am terrible at structural forms and I know too little about encryption protocols. Don't be afraid of getting help where you are out of your depth.

On the bright side though I've met a lot of very good people over the years who are good at different aspects of coding. I've met "white hat" hackers who love to find exploits just so they can tell you about them. I've had the privilege to teach other the basics and seen them move on to do good things. I just know that I'll never have the time or patience to build another game again.
If you look like prey you will be eaten

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JadeFalcon
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Re: Never, ever, ever...

Postby JadeFalcon » Tue May 22, 2018 4:55 am

so are you coding for ember or not
Don't take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

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ri0t
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Joined: Sun May 13, 2018 12:52 am

Re: Never, ever, ever...

Postby ri0t » Tue May 22, 2018 12:23 pm

This post made me miss my C64 and Basic

10 Print "ri0t goes west"

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Kruell
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Joined: Thu May 26, 2016 10:35 pm

Re: Never, ever, ever...

Postby Kruell » Tue May 22, 2018 3:28 pm

JadeFalcon wrote:so are you coding for ember or not

Chris doesn't let others look at his code. He's proprietary like that.
If you look like prey you will be eaten

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Styx
Posts: 451
Joined: Sat Dec 17, 2016 5:14 am

Re: Never, ever, ever...

Postby Styx » Wed Jun 06, 2018 11:23 pm

Machine code took 16 lines to do a simple print to screen command. Change is inevitable but sometimes it's good. Ps I still hate modules


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