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?

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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.

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James Scholes @jscholes@dragonscave.space

5mo

@fastfinge That said, thinking about object graphs, what gets passed where, and other architectural stuff is legitimately my favourite part of software dev. But I can't really do it without at least a semi-useful or interesting project to apply it to.

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

5mo

@jscholes Hah. So this all started when I decided I wanted a class where I could create a new menu, add the selection key, a name, and a callback function for each item, then call the menu to print itself and do all the input and error checking, and call the callback for whatever item was chosen. And then it just kept growing. I'm not even at the object graph stage. I just hate most of the text games I mentioned, where every menu looks and acts different, because print statements and case statements are just sprinkled all over the code.

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