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Posted - 3/15/2007 4:45:21 PM | i know you guys must be getting sick of me starting stuff and not finishing, so why read this journal anymore? i don't blame you. i'm getting sick of it myself. instead of announcing any more "projects" i'm going to focus my energy on figuring out wtf is wrong with my method.
when i've got a "good idea" that i want to work with, i'm usually pretty excited. i've proven to myself with space fortress and the latest attempt at actionrpg with one-week, that interative programming works. get something up and going as fast as possible and refactor when the code is too messy to move forward. you've seen that i CAN get something going. you've also seen that i can't get anything DONE.
i think the biggest reason for this is that my visions are still visions when i hit the code. i think that dragon warrior was probably closest to being ready for coding, of all the projects i've had so far. i thought out alot of the aspects of the game before i started coding. i still have the notebook i wrote them in.
the probem is, i haven't answered a bunch of important game design questions. should the game maps be single screen like in z:la or should they be bigger? answering this one question might be easy right now, but there are a whole bunch of other questions just like it. answering them all means closing the door to possibilities. if i try to keep the door open that means i'm writing alot more code and worrying about things that i haven't yet envisioned. its alot of effort for nothing at the moment.
you can't really refactor code if the game design didn't support an idea you wanted to add "later". when i've suffered too many disappointments from bad design, it feels like i need to scrap the whole thing and start over.. and by that time i'm ready to give up.
another issue is about aiming too low. when i start out i see something i can attain, and as i think about it more i ask "well why am i settling with A or B being like this when i can envision them being better?" and then i start thinking about what would make them better and it spirals out of control. when i come back to what i was working on it looks like a neandrathal wrote it: why am i settling for this? but i just saw that aiming higher took me somewhere i couldn't acheive. so what do i do, i can't settle but i can't aim higher.
i'm stuck not knowing a whole bunch of things and just being confused about what to do. i used to think my problem was about arranging my information, but it's really that i don't know what i'm trying to program when i'm in the middle of programming it. i saw one of viridian's todo lists for planitia and it blew me away how he had everything broken down. he didn't know what he wanted to do with the game but he had this huge list of things to do. i'm baffled.
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| 40hr actionRPG | 
Posted - 3/5/2007 7:37:25 AM | err so yeah, i went about the one-week all wrong. i misunderstood that i was supposed to log hours towards an ideal work week. oops. i've learned from some of my mistakes on the project and i'm restarting from scratch. i'm following the outline at how to build a game in a week from scratch with no budget. right now i'm still on my first couple of hours, setting up a framework that will hopefully do the job.
i was copying mcshaffry's event manager and halfway through his code i was like "wtf, i don't understand most of this, how am i going to put it to use?!" i mean the guy's using templated functions as member methods, and its full of stuff i don't see anywhere near this section of the book. the first thing on my mind this morning came out of my keyboard into #GameDevelopers:
<SteelGolem> i gotta learn how to take my defeats better than this
<SteelGolem> i was struggling with mcshaffry's complicated (for me) game object message system yesterday and i knew before i was halfway done copying it over, that i didn't understand enough of how the code worked that i would be able to use it
<SteelGolem> i was baffled and confounded and i threw my hands in the air and played Okami for the rest of the day
<SteelGolem> maybe thats exactly what i needed, but the feeling of hopelessness didn't help anything
i don't know if this is a Dr Phil moment or what but its a serious problem that's been hampering my progress for years. i'm at about 5 hours and i lost the last 3 hours fighting with something i didn't understand. big thanks to Viridian, you helped me figure out templated functions. i'm gonna need a book on that before i touch Game Coding Complete again. its way over my head.
the goal of THIS project is much more focused than the one-week was. one-week was more to see what i could accomplish in a set amount of time. i got further than i ever have with actionRPG but i set lofty goals for the time constraint. it was a good learning experience. this time i'm aiming at getting DragonWarrior1 going with (a crippled sort of) actionRPG.
i think already i lost focus of that goal - i don't think i actually NEED an event system for one-monster battles. i guess one of the hidden agendas is that i don't want the code to be another throwaway, i really hate spending time making something to just throw it out in the end. maybe i need to get used to that. i want to wind up with the beginnings of an actionRPG engine that i can expand and do other things with. too lofty a goal for this 40-hour thing? probably. i already lost 3 hours because of it.
Blackdot, despite not knowing the details of the project, you were absolutely right. i wouldn't have been willing to listen to you either way though, i was hell-bent on getting that "feature" in yesterday. i see now that i gotta drop the idea. when i pick up actionRPG again after 40hours is done, i'm pretty sure i HAVE to get it in, though. Viridian, i'm gonna need to make the first iteration with void*'s flying around. sorry, man. i can't do things any other way than what i understand.
i gotta figure out a better way to track my time. right now i'm just adding time tags sporadically through my thought-dump text files [poop break, 8:37am].. if i can't get any suggestions about anything else, you guys, at least throw some ideas about that at me. i need to see that i've wasted a full hour beating my head against a wall, before it turns into 3 hours. hmm, maybe i could build a little time tracker tool that has start, pause, and stop buttons and a textbox that makes a time tag with a time sum on it... almost like a punch clock program. that's actually not a half-bad idea.
oh, and i'm pretty sure Twilight Princess pillaged Okami's gameplay from Clover. i hate that i'm trying to circle my analog for spin attacks and not getting anything. damn you nintendo! gimme a brush and canvas over link's tools, any day of the week (but give me my ball-and-chain.. god i love that thing!)
/me out
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| Life 0.7a | 
Posted - 3/2/2007 7:38:36 PM | i've got the weekend but i'm not sure what's on tab yet. life's becoming awfully complicated atm and its hard to think of other stuff right now. sry?
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