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Coffee Is Hard

stilldrinking.org

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Re: Coffee Is Hard

#81

Post by caseymarquis »

Having enjoyed the article, it also reminded me why I never once finished making a game.

Instead of seeing the example code and thinking 'Ah, yes, that code gets something done in a straight-forward way.', I instead think, 'I'm pretty sure I could build a scripting engine and turn most of that code into ajax calls to json files. Of course, I'd then have to build an in-game editor which allowed you to modify the contents of the json files while playing the game with hot-swapping content. Huh, art? Plot? Fun? Oh, yeah, I guess I'll probably need those... eventually...'

Fortunately, trying (and failing) to make games led me to realize that I really love programming and building maintainable systems.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#82

Post by aasasd »

brians wrote: post #15
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…

I’d start without the animations, in something like Inform 7: http://inform7.com/ It’s easy to learn small things, reasonable to scale to harder things, and the award winning games regularly publish their sources—so you can copy and tweak and learn.

I lately got a buzz to play some detective adventures, which predictably had me combing through the lists of adventures on several sites. As a result, I now have a lament that there doesn't seem to be an engine for creating graphical adventures as easily as text ones: with lots of ready-made images that could be put in the proper order for the game. Not even with much interactivity, since something like HTML with hyperlink trees of choices would likely be more humane than point-and-click pixel hunting.

Though, maybe Adventure Game Studio and free images do the trick, dunno.

Specifically, I myself would play games that are set in the same city if the city was big and detailed enough. Just let the games be something more than the hyper-casual churn of ‘question the witnesses, look for evidence, name the perpetrator.’

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#83

Post by pmarreck »

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…

Life is mostly moving bits of physical material from one location to another in an endless series of queues, and programming is mostly transforming data from one form into another.

It's the bits in between those things that are the juicy fun part, though, I guess

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#84

Post by aasasd »

I'm having flashbacks to late 90s–early 2000s, when oldschool adventures were on their last legs and I still thought that I could make one just by putting together a hundred random puzzles.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#85

Post by nebulous1 »

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…

If you want to create a game you could go with GameMaker or Construct 2 or Adventure Game Studio (if you want an adventure game like SQ1 that he's describing). These are applications that provide you with an interface you can interact with, along with an associated programming language in order to make things happen. So you can draw levels and place objects with your mouse, and then make them move with a script.

GameMaker has a non-programming method but I don't know how capable it really is. I wouldn't worry too much about what language you learn, at your stage it's more about the general knowledge of how to get things moving. Transitioning to another language at a later point won't be difficult.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#86

Post by joe_the_user »

monktastic1 wrote: post #16
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…

At the risk of sounding hippie, "tedious" and "boring" are emotional reactions to the chores, and not attributable to the chores themselves. We don't have to do that. "Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of us to awaken from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfuln…

I'm a fan of meditation and mind body awareness. I think that digging a ditch can a quite interesting because, while somewhat repetitive, it also involves variation and the challenge putting your entire body into the activity. Even dish washing or sweeping involves quite a bit of integrating intention and the use of the body.

All that said, I don't think you can say this is just a question of attitude. Some activities just inherently suck - 19th factory jobs, manual data entry and things of this sort can't be redeemed by attitude. Indeed, it's probably better to hate jobs like that than to think of them as a reasonable place for a human being to end up.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#87

Post by ip26 »

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…

Think of it this way- the years you spent optimizing your life and removing tedious unnecessary work was preparation for becoming a parent, freeing up time you can now invest in your kid.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#88

Post by cogman10 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #53
SamBam wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having played most of the Sierra and LucasArts games when I was much younger, I feel, though cannot confirm, that there was a shift in these kinds of games such that you couldn't actually progress too far beyond a fail state. That is, by about Space Quest II or III, you could still take an action that would lead to your death within a minute or so, but you could no longer take actions that would lead you to dying/bei…

LucasArts had a very strong bent towards not putting you in a fail state. My understanding is that Sierra was intending to be more fair as time went on, but they had a bias against playtesting so there were still some big goofs that got through. I think all of the first 5 KQ games had ways to lose items that would later be needed to win. KQ VI had a branching path and if you picked the "easy" branch you were unlikely…

I never got full points on that game. I think I wasted months on it before giving up.

Maybe my favorite KQ memory was KQ 3. Just getting out of the house took my family weeks. Every single misstep turned you into dust. And once you figured it all out, just walking down that stupid path you were 1 pixel away from death in some places.

Those were some fun games.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#89

Post by r00fus »

monktastic1 wrote: post #16
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…

At the risk of sounding hippie, "tedious" and "boring" are emotional reactions to the chores, and not attributable to the chores themselves. We don't have to do that. "Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of us to awaken from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfuln…

As a sidenote, I find that being overly tired or stressed makes it far more difficult for me to appreciate/enjoy the miracle of the everyday quotidian.

Part of not being bored is to ensure you are "present", which is a whole lot easier when you're well rested.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#90

Post by psalminen »

matwood wrote: post #59
throw0101a wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sisyphus may disagree. :) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus

If I was Sisyphus and got the boulder to the top, I would push it back down myself. I'm going to die eventually, so is it futile to exercise everyday, to learn, to try and be a better person? I don't think so, but all of those things are journeys that never end and require many mundane tasks.

> If I was Sisyphus and got the boulder to the top, I would push it back down myself.

I'm really loving this quote, definitely using it at some point.

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