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Coffee Is Hard

stilldrinking.org

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Re: Coffee Is Hard

#31

Post by iClaudiusX »

godot wrote: post #6

As a geek and a fan of 80s-90s PC games (not just Sierra but also LucasArts adventure games and so on), this was a super entertaining read on its own; but I also enjoyed some of these insights about life in general from it: > Living is mostly a series of repetitive and unrelated tasks. It makes sense that the most tedious things to code are the tedious things that just have to be done. There are no life lessons or gy…

That's interesting because otherwise tedious chores like washing dishes or cleaning can feel meditative and therapeutic after I've had my coffee.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#32

Post by journalctl »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #4

This reminds me of Scribblenauts. There was an interview with one of the devs at the E3 before it was released and he discussed how much time went into the game simply to pad the internal "dictionary" and conjure up not just things, but also make sure that those things could interact with other things (e.g. "bread" should be able to interact with "toaster" to make "toast"). I don't remember if it was the dev talking…

Oh wow, Scribblenauts takes me back! I love games like that. Half the fun is sitting there just figuring out what interacts with what. If I recall correctly, you can conjure up a Large Hadron Collider, which blows up and makes you lose a life. It sounds tedious to program for sure, but the result was amazingly fun.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#33

Post by egypturnash »

jacobr1 wrote: post #25
TurkishPoptart wrote: post #10

I really like this guy's writing and am grateful that he shared some of the coding challenges. I'd really like to be able to program games like this, and while I'm not a programmer, I'd like to learn how. In TFA he shares some of the code to check the coffee "state": >'LOOK AT COFFEE MAKER': () => { if( State.scene.state.coffeedrunk ) { return "The coffee maker has done its job and mercifully drained the last life ou…

The original games uses a custom scripting engine that manages this called SCUMM. For a good description see: https://www.monades.dev/scumm-internals-syntax/

SCUMM was used by Lucasfilm's adventures; its name is an abbreviation of Scripting Utility For Maniac Mansion.

Sierra's graphic adventure games used their own toolkit called AGI, which stood for Adventure Game Interpreter. http://www.agidev.com

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#34

Post by throwaway66920 »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #4

This reminds me of Scribblenauts. There was an interview with one of the devs at the E3 before it was released and he discussed how much time went into the game simply to pad the internal "dictionary" and conjure up not just things, but also make sure that those things could interact with other things (e.g. "bread" should be able to interact with "toaster" to make "toast"). I don't remember if it was the dev talking…

I always thought that game must have an incredible ontology underneath it that would be amazingly useful to other ventures...

I also recall playing it and, at a certain point, realizing that I was stubbornly uncreative in using the variety of options available to me.

In retrospect maybe that wasn’t true, and the game managed the massive potential for variance by condensing things into smaller buckets. Either way those were some brave developers agreeing to that project scope.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#35

Post by deng »

I really recommend the author's book "And then I thought I was a fish". Not only is it incredibly funny, in my opinion this is one of the best descriptions of a drug-induced psychosis out there. It is really pretty rare that someone can remember that much from such an episode and also has the ability to put it to paper.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#36

Post by danharaj »

godot wrote: post #6

As a geek and a fan of 80s-90s PC games (not just Sierra but also LucasArts adventure games and so on), this was a super entertaining read on its own; but I also enjoyed some of these insights about life in general from it: > Living is mostly a series of repetitive and unrelated tasks. It makes sense that the most tedious things to code are the tedious things that just have to be done. There are no life lessons or gy…

The way is the dust of the way.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#37

Post by SamBam »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #30
mikestew wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but you can take it at face value to mean what it is: most of life sucks. Boy, howdy, have you misinterpreted the Buddha. I believe most would agree that in context, Buddha was saying, "Life is suffering because $REASONS. But it doesn't have to be, because $OTHER_REASONS." A vast oversimplification, yes, but I feel that it is a much more accurate representation of the quote.

If that's the case you're right and I'm completely wrong about that quote. I don't pretend to be a Buddhist so you're more likely to be right than me. I have not bothered to verify this as of this writing. Another famous quote that everybody gets wrong because they cut it short: "Distance makes the heart grow fonder" That quote means separation is good for couples, but almost nobody knows the actual quote: "Distance…

The fact that there was an original version of a quote doesn't make the original version any more "true," so I've never quite understood the instinct of people to use it as some kind of gotcha.

Indeed, if anything it seems like in general the opposite would be true, if common culture adapts a quote to more accurately fit their reality (irrespective of whether this particular quote is "true" or not).

(Also, I can't find any source for your claim, despite plenty of articles on the source of the phrase, such as https://quotes.yourdictionary.com/articles/who-said-absence-..., so I'm guessing that's a myth.)

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#40

Post by throwaway66920 »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #10

I really like this guy's writing and am grateful that he shared some of the coding challenges. I'd really like to be able to program games like this, and while I'm not a programmer, I'd like to learn how. In TFA he shares some of the code to check the coffee "state": >'LOOK AT COFFEE MAKER': () => { if( State.scene.state.coffeedrunk ) { return "The coffee maker has done its job and mercifully drained the last life ou…

When you think about game design you have two big buckets. Writing code to make mechanics work, and writing code to make new content. This kind of game is almost entirely the latter because it’s not much more than handling one off edge cases and is very simple.

I would recommend using https://love2d.org/ to get started. This is a simple language built around a 2D game engine with (I think) many examples to follow

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