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Prince of Persia in JavaScript

princejs.com

131–140 of 237 posts

Re: Prince of Persia in JavaScript

#135

Awesome! Takes me back :) My 8 yo son is playing it now, he knows all the modern consoles, but this is challenging him. He is frustrated things are hard from the beginning, jumps don't work right away and he stopped after a few minutes. I remember my perseverance as a kid. I was thinking about that lately, I see my kids don't have this strong motivation as I had, not for anything. Everything works for them and is lay…

If you want to counteract this tendency, consider getting them into (competitive) sports. Nothing will work right away, they will have to „grind“ (train/practice) a lot, failures are all but certain; but hard work and perseverance get rewarded, and the successes are all the sweeter. As a young guy who has had a modern and easy childhood not unlike the one you describe, many of my most cherished memories come from com…

Sports and musical instruments - if you can keep them motivated/interested, the results of focused practice can’t be ignored.

To some extent I only realized this late in life myself. I don’t play a musical instrument, schoolwork through undergraduate never required really hard work and as an athlete I was a lackluster football player who never really put in the time to get better. But as an adult, computer programming and crossword puzzles were things which I applied myself to and was astonished to see how much better I could get at them by putting in the time and effort. (That being said I am an awful teacher - as an autodidact myself, I often - unfairly - feel that others aren’t putting enough effort in.)

Re: Prince of Persia in JavaScript

#136

If you haven't seen Jordan Mechner talking about the development of Prince of Persia yet (definitely recommended): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0VfmXKq54&ab_channel=ArsTe...

He published a book containing his journal entries from the time as well:

https://jordanmechner.com/store/the-making-of-prince-of-pers...

My notes about it:

https://mtlynch.io/book-reports/making-of-prince-of-persia/

Re: Prince of Persia in JavaScript

#138

Awesome! Takes me back :) My 8 yo son is playing it now, he knows all the modern consoles, but this is challenging him. He is frustrated things are hard from the beginning, jumps don't work right away and he stopped after a few minutes. I remember my perseverance as a kid. I was thinking about that lately, I see my kids don't have this strong motivation as I had, not for anything. Everything works for them and is lay…

I had countless selfmade bootdisks to config DOS to play games. Almost every game did need it's own bootdisk.

Re: Prince of Persia in JavaScript

#139

Awesome! Takes me back :) My 8 yo son is playing it now, he knows all the modern consoles, but this is challenging him. He is frustrated things are hard from the beginning, jumps don't work right away and he stopped after a few minutes. I remember my perseverance as a kid. I was thinking about that lately, I see my kids don't have this strong motivation as I had, not for anything. Everything works for them and is lay…

> I see my kids don't have much of these challenges, everything works for them.

This is one of the reasons I recommend teaching kids C++ early.

Between build systems, ABI issues, compiler error messages, and undefined behavior it really builds perseverance and a great sense of accomplishment when your program compiles and runs correctly.

I am not aware of any other production language that gives that sense of accomplishment and requires that level of perseverance.

Re: Prince of Persia in JavaScript

#140
post #12
post #7

Can you add action buttons? The directional buttons were easy enough to infer, but not sure what other types of input are possible. (I’m on mobile)

i just tried it on mobile and i am very impressed. the movement controls are very intuitive. they don't hit accurately but they work in an intuitive way. i tapped the four directions and four quadrants of the play screen. and the character responded as i expected. i am with you though. i have no idea how i will use the sword when i get it.

Interesting. Only the four direction buttons work for me, regardless of num lock setting. eg 2, 4, 6, 8. None of the corner buttons nor middle button have any kind of effect.

This is when using Firefox on Linux, and using a standard 101-key external keyboard.

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