You've just given me the best idea! A sport's drink for game devers called "Motivation". I wonder what would be in it?

Yea but even if you don't finish what you started, at least you must have gained some new insights or experience in working on it? There's always something to take away...

(you can tell I'm good at rationalizing this behavior [wink])

Actually, this reminds me of a game someone here made a long time ago: Medival Farmer 3. Search for it - I think its still up somewhere (I don't have a copy - wiped HD)

I actually had something similar to that half-done. It was a pretty console app, but I got a little bored with the concept of a text-based game and trashed to project. Mine was a little less mirco-management, a little simpler. Just another thing that won't get done.

You started strongly in the alliteration department with "Dungeon Delver", but then lost the spark. The projects will henceforth be known as "Medieval Micromanager" and your choice of "Island Impresario" or "Island Investor".

Quote:Yea but even if you don't finish what you started, at least you must have gained some new insights or experience in working on it? There's always something to take away...

Utter tommyrot. When you've reached such heights of programming excellence as that reached by the nigh-omnipotent TANSTAAFL, an incomplete project is not a learning experience. It is folly and shame, deserving of nothing but scorn. Don't sugar-coat TANS's failures, as it will only spoil him.

I was going to say much the same thing that John Hattan did, but realized that it would seem like self-deprecating "feel sorry for me" type talk.

I've got no excuses. I'm a damn good programmer, and this task is well within my skill set.

But I think I've figured out the problem I'm having....

Everything in the game is more interconnected than I normally deal with, and so I get lost in the details and mutual dependencies.

Take the game concept of Food. Food is tied to members of the population in two ways. Making a Peasant costs Food, and each turn each member of the population has to consume one Food or starve to death. Since on any given turn, there might not be enough Food to go around, the game has to have the ability to portion out the Food to the various types of people.

Also, Food is tied to Farms where it is grown, and Granaries, where it is stored. Farms are indirectly tied to Peasants, who product Production points that can be spent at Farms, as well as connected via the Production used to build the Farms in the first place.

As you can see, there are many details to get lost in, and if you try to anticipate all of these dependencies in your code and make nice OO code that works "the right way", you'll easily get tripped up.

INSTEAD, the type of thing that I just have to do is stuff like this:



and just kind of blunder through it.

And no, there are no "insights" or "valuable experiences" to be gained from this. This is pretty much the same programming paradigm I used when programming in line number BASIC. Brute force and global variables.