Note by @fastfinge

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

5mo

Games I love like Warsim, The Wastes, and usurper inspired me to think about creating my own console-based game. Then I wrote 750 lines of code just to make a reusable system for console menus. And realized the save system is going to be another 500 lines, probably. And then the settings system. And after thinking about 2000 lines of code before I can get to anything even resembling the simplest game mechanic, I'm not inspired, anymore. Why is 99 percent of programming doing the least interesting part of any project?

James Scholes @jscholes@dragonscave.space

5mo

@fastfinge Lots of people struggle to prioritise fun over flexibility. My suggestion is to organically build those boring boilerplate systems bit by bit as they're needed. No menu system might mean manually editing stuff in a file between runs during initial development, but is probably better than no game.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

5mo

@jscholes If I do it that way, it just means refactoring later, though. And that's even harder and less fun because now you're rebuilding things that already exist.

James Scholes @jscholes@dragonscave.space

5mo

@fastfinge Refactoring is inevitable.

If you haven't built a menu system to begin with, there'll be nothing to rebuild. The refactoring will mostly be limited to slotting it in once you start.

If you've built one early that doesn't actually solve the problems you end up needing it to, or solves them in a way that ultimately makes it hard to integrate, that's when you'll end up rewriting stuff.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

5mo

@jscholes Maybe. I've played enough of this style of game that I have pretty strong opinions about how it should all work, though.