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Fucking hate programming...sometimes

Posted: May 4th, 2019, 7:38 am
by albinopapa
So, I'm working on a game for a change and am reminded why I haven't finished a single game yet. IT'S FRUSTRATING AS HELL!!!!!!!!!

So my design is as follows.
I have a maze. The maze has rooms. The rooms have tiles.

Basically, instead of creating a HUGE tile map, I break it down into rooms. To get a specific tile, I do some math to find the room, then do some more math to calculate the index of the tile for that room, a bit of a pain, but that part works.

Was completely stumped for about 2 days. I went back and watched the old intermediate series where chili covers handling collision between two rectangles and let me tell you, I miss the old chili videos. That one was about three and a half hours long and I had to take in sections. So chill, voice was soothing, random expletives...those were the days.

Now back to the experience. The problem was my character would either teleport through walls or the program would crash for accessing some out of bounds area. I finally found a piece in the video that helped me out and I dismissed it at first, but finally put it all together and I'm partially excited to continue and partially drained and dreading to continue. This is where I usually call it quits on a project. When it takes me days to find a solution to a problem, I'm usually so wiped out that I lose interest in all the upcoming issues I'm going to be facing. I have a little better grasp of some things I was doing wrong, but I know there are going to be more gotchas.

I'm using my dim2d library and I think that is the cause of some of my frustrations. While it works well in some cases, it's very restrictive in others or just flat out doesn't fit the situation so there are still parts I'm going to need to use nested for loops. I think I'll be fine as long as I don't try to force the use of the algorithms.

Right now, there's nothing to show really. I have a maze generated and a sprite moving around with collisions, so let me get a little further before I share.

Re: Fucking hate programming...sometimes

Posted: May 5th, 2019, 7:30 pm
by krautersuppe
You did publish this though.
And isn't
I have a maze generated and a sprite moving around with collisions
basically all there is to it with classics like pacman?

Re: Fucking hate programming...sometimes

Posted: May 6th, 2019, 4:38 am
by albinopapa
Thanks mate. I had forgotten about or dismissed that project. I'm currently working on rendering out the animations for movement in the eight 2D directions and am wishing I wouldn't have chosen a top down game to work on. A side scroller would have allowed for something like skeletal animations, which I haven't fully implemented before, but some testing shows it shouldn't be too complicated. I can cut in half the number of renders by mirroring some of the sprites, but five * num_states is still a lot of work.

I'm using DAZ3D for posing/animations and rendering instead of using pixel art so it shouldn't be too much work, just time consuming and monotonous.

I need to come up with some sort of goal for this as well. Right now, there isn't even an "end" to the maze. I guess I need to come up with some ways to generate an exit, and as I say that, I think I just came up with one that I like.

Re: Fucking hate programming...sometimes

Posted: May 7th, 2019, 4:12 pm
by chili
I just think about all the kids who come to me and are like "I need an idea for a game project", and when I give them something that seems about at the right level they be like "seems too easy, I want a challenge".

Oh no. Oh no no no.

Re: Fucking hate programming...sometimes

Posted: May 7th, 2019, 8:24 pm
by albinopapa
I know right?

Re: Fucking hate programming...sometimes

Posted: May 8th, 2019, 1:06 am
by MrGodin
It's hard to (a) come up with a game idea (b) try and implement your idea without losing focus, (c) finding out it's a lot of work, assets, coding and having it all come together nicely. Games are hard, displaying data is easy.

Re: Fucking hate programming...sometimes

Posted: May 8th, 2019, 6:52 am
by albinopapa
Yep, spent a day or two on assets already, and not sure which is more frustrating, problem solving or asset creation.