Subjunctive Games
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Devlog: Learning by Doing Has Its Downsides
🕑 Added 2024-04-23 12:44:53 +0000 UTCWhen I started working on MindWare several months ago, I didn't know what I was doing and most of my time was spent trying to make things work by any means necessary.
Whenever I would successfully solve a problem, I would quickly move on to the next challenge. This continuous shift in focus created a patchwork of solutions that, while functional in the short term, weren't built to scale or maintain. As the game's complexity grew, the ad hoc methods started to conflict with one another, leading to a tangled web of code that became increasingly difficult to manage.
I eventually reached a point where I was spending more time untangling the mess I had created than I was actually making progress on the game. It became clear that I needed to take a step back and reevaluate my approach.
Fortunately, after much invisible work, I am happy to say that much of that work is now done (at least for now), and I'm aaaalmost ready to start working on the open section of Chapter 1. There are still many bugs to be fixed, many optimizations to be made, and many lessons to be learned, but it no longer feels like I'm drowning when I open my editor.
The bad news is that I probably won't be able to release version 0.1.0 this week. Instead, I will release version 0.0.9b to reflect my focus on bug fixes, optimizations, and so on.
Comments
gg
Well I've been there many times. Start with an established working program or game. Look at Female Agent game and how lovely it is. Now look at Girl Spy - it's built on top of FA. I had to put on a demo in DC. In one window was random graphic patterns - I found graphics programming for X-Windows at my local Barnes and Noble. In another two windows was video and a systems engineer provided a framegrabber which has a software demo. I gutted the demo for how to put video on the screen and folded it into my program. For the last window I needed an external device with buttons and lights and a window window corresponding buttons and lights. Toggle a switch on one and a light on the other is on. Systems engineer made the box and cable. Window resize was left for later in the month. The commute would have killed me so I stayed with my aunt nextdoor to Bruce Willis and Demi Moore for example. In this arena, I would start with Hiev tools. If you like what another game is doing then dig in and extract. Don't reinvent the wheel. Or do if it helps. I didn't have any time for that demo what with twice daily meetings and a three month drop deadline.
