The Woes of a Tired Programmer
By shishkebab09 11 Comments
I call myself a programmer, but there are several things about this that get to me more every day.
Before anything, though, it's really hard to type with my cat sitting on my lap trying to gnaw at my left thumb. Okay, now he's just sitting in front of the monitor chasing the moving text cursor. This will do fine.
My issue with my "programmer" status is I have zero ambition. Every day that I try to work on "my game," the same stupid bullshit repeats. I start up Flash (more on that later), and look at all the piss-poor work I've decided to save in the past, and figure I better start a new file. Then I draw some grey shapes for my nonexistant "animator" to fill in later, throw some hardly functional scripts on them make them into walls, floors, or moving entities, and quickly become bored since this is exactly what I did last time I decided to work. A bit of "testing" the half finished scripts, and eventually I decide I've accomplished nothing and exit the program without saving.
And you know what? I'm not going to complain about Flash. This is my fault.
I think the problem lies in that I find nothing more gratifying than teaching myself new techniques. I spent all of high school on my laptop thinking of complex systems that I didn't yet know how to create, then creating them, and then fine-tuning them. I get no greater joy than taking on a challenge, then ending up with something even cooler because my method of programming opened up new ideas while I was going. This probably explains why my most "complete" project I've made was a simple 2d hack-and-slash, but 75% of the time working on it was spent creating a death system that generated a level of "hell" with random properties where surviving allowed the player to continue, but failure meant a true game over. That was REALLY fun.
Also AI. AI is SUPER fun to program. On a character, that is.
So back to the actual problem: I can't get back to that point where I'm not just coding, but creating anymore. So I want to make a game? Great. That'll be hours of bullshit programming I've done a thousand times before I get to the fun, creative part. Programming a character to move, duck, jump, attack, etc. and play all the animations to match was a blast when I was figuring it out as I went. It's so tedious yet time-consuming now, though, that it's the main thing keeping me from starting anything. I don't want to do that part again.
I truly think I'd be able to have a lot of fun programming again (even the character part) if I had an animator or a music writer, or ANYONE to drive the project forward with me, but I'm terrified of making a commitment and letting my partner down. THIS is the part that's not helped by Flash. My brother and I have several game ideas, and he can animate, but not with Flash.
Hm...this is getting to be a wall of text coming out of my ass here. Leave a comment, if you will, and I'd love to speak with some purpose.
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