If I’m gonna get stuck on something, it may as well be a problem I can make a bunch of obstacle related puns with, right?
Okay, this was not a good week for progress. I got about halfway through implementing the solution I’d settled on, but it was weird and tricky and hard to keep track of what I was doing in my head, and yesterday, looking at what I’d done on it so far, I knew for a fact that I could do better.
So I started over.
Which means that this week’s work is basically all down the drain. Ugh. On the plus side, given a couple of hours to work in, I’m already halfway through implementing my new, simpler, more reliable, and easier to understand solution.
What’s the lesson here?
Setting short deadlines on coming up with plans isn’t always a good idea. I came up with a good insight and immediately built a plan of action on top of it, but one insight isn’t much. There are a million plans one could contrive given a single valid insight, an infinite plane of possibilities hinged on that one point. I should have known that the first one I came up with would be garbage. The first one is always garbage. I should have kept thinking about it until I was sure I had the right plan of action.
Oh well.
I’ll chalk this week up as a solid learning experience, programming-wise. Writing down a plan of action on paper was a good idea, but I think in the future I’ll go from that to pseudocode before I start getting into the guts of the programming, lest I do a bunch of unnecessary work like I did this time.
Another lesson I’m learning the hard way is that just working on programming day after day is very stressful and not super rewarding, particularly when I’m just hammering on the same code every day and don’t have it in a place where it’s ready to build yet. Between this and a couple of new developments which imply that I may not have to work quite as hard to sustain myself over the next few months, I’m thinking it may be high time to get back to doing animation and/or drawing backgrounds. Indeed, once I get the new collision system up and running, it will be an excellent time to start implementing the test animations I’ve been making into the game. And, once those are in, I can see about combining all of the above to make one fully realized, albeit quite sparse, level.
Yes. That seems like a plan. Let’s hope it’s the right one, this time.