Juliean said:
So you are saying that you are fine with being a subpar programmer, just because you can get away with it.
This is one of the things that make me a “bad programmer” according to lists I found. You can get away with it but there's a bit more attached to this behaviour. My current verdict on my own coding standards is: I was trying to apply OOP, but OOP is probably useless for me. I was instead doing data orientated pogramming all along and trying to shove OOP standards into it and judging it by that. From a data oriented programming point of view, I'm less terrible. ?♂️
That's all very true.
So true, yes. There's nothing specifically dramatic about my journey, it's not worse than many other gamedev stories. There's a whole army of “not much to show” people out there, some are very talented. Like I knew an artist who started over and over again and I thought everything he modelled was pure gold.
I'm not particularly frustrated either, especially not after some months break. But certainly lower on energy than I used to be. Had I not spent time in gamedev I would forever wonder if I could have done it, probably.
I'm probably going back to gamedev soon. I did the first step, and cleaned up here. Somewhere is a backup harddisk with the projects.
But this time I'll be very organised, I might have to evolve to being a leader. My first steps will be to publish the thing I made before, to get feedback, maybe people even like it. Then move on to an online shooter. I'll write a full game design document so that it can be presented to others. I'll cut down all the steps into children's portions. I will skip on unnecessary things like cheat-protection for the start. And I'm going to accept minecraft-tier graphics. I will be fine using only 5 different types of trees. I'm going to take “minimum viable product” very serious and shrink the project so much that I could finish it alone, and still try to get help from different people. No milestone of this project should ever take longer than 2 weeks to reach.
My time estimation / actual time spent ratio is 1:3. Maybe 2 weeks for a milestone is still too long, as they'd turn into 6. Maybe I should go for 1 week. And planning the entire project to take 3 months, not 6.
Yes, everything needs to be cut into ant portions. No more smart solving of self-created problems, only solutions now. And no more frustration, only for fun. Will see how it goes.
My first step would be to make a new map generator (old one was way too slow), that's actually not very much fun already. ?