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🇨🇦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 If I ever finish the basics, the thing I'm aiming for, probably in 70 years or so, is a singleplayer trade wars/elite style space game. Planetary exploration, trading, combat, procedurally generated galaxy, etc. All the stuff we have in that style is either multiplayer PVP, or only semi-accessible like smugglers5. Interface via console menus, because that feels both simple and retro. But with stuff happening in realtime like textspaced used to be (it's now discontinued), and high quality sound. The idea is you just let it run on your taskbar and check in every 20-30 minutes when you hear something that needs doing. So kind of casual all-day play while multitasking. I've dreamed of something like that for like 20 years, but nobody has done anything even close. Textspaced was the nearest, but it never quite got there, and it's gone, now.
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