More Game-Dev | Vacation | Focus

Game Dev

Since beginning to work on my game, I haven’t made many posts on the blog. I have been engrossed in the project from head to toe. I haven’t ever found any project quite so fun to build and the challenges have been enlightening.

Part of what convinced me to make a game, was watching a video by Jonathan Blow, discussing that, when you get good at one kind of programming, it creates a plateau. You tend to overcome the same similar problem over and over again. Even if there are a hundred problems you might be solving, there are a hundred thousand problems that exist, but you’ll never run into the other 99.9% of problems if you only ever program in one narrow industry.

Thus far, his assessment appears to be correct. While my game does take place entirely across a CLI, I’ve made the visuals render dynamically to the user’s screen size. The new project also created a ton of necessary growth. Using a ton of SQL, building out my very own API that no one has touched has been a ton of fun. The problems of grabbing details on the terminal window size whether the user is on IOS, Windows, or Linux was really fun, and doing something similar on Wifi data, since I need to geolocate my user even if they’re not on a Phone, has been great. Translating GPS coordinates, and rendering ASCII art to the user’s terminal based on those coordinates based on simply taking a 2D array of strings, and printing them with a simple for loop, all of these problems have definitively changed the way I think of simple 2D graphics, for the better.

I plan to keep going on this project. I can do some of the core game functionalities, but I am entering the phase where I assign a ‘worker’ to a ’task’ at a ’location, and generating a ‘resource’ (iron, wood, food, etc…). It has been really interesting to see just how much effort has been required to build a whole game on my own. I have to consider UI, consider rendering, consider the DB schema, the API construction, etc..

Vacation

My family and I took a longer vacation. It was a great time, and I found it surprisingly easy to disconnect mentally and be present there. By the time we left, I was feeling incredibly antsy to come home and go back to my normal routine, and get back to programming.

I am not an expert in human psychology, but I’ve been really interested in the process my is going through in my desire for growth. My younger years were spent with confidence that a life filled with nothing but spare time, and nothing to do but play video games, scroll on social media, and hang out with my friends, would be the best kind of life. For whatever reason, I simply don’t find spending my time that way to be worth much to my own happiness. While I was perfectly content to relax most of the time on vacation, I had a longing to get back to doing something I felt was challenging.

My first thought, was that these thoughts were brought on by a fear of my skills not being competitive enough. However, over time, I look back and see this is probably not the case. When presented great opportunities to do things that are good for my career, like networking opportunities, or a chance to do an interview with an employer, I found those things ‘boring’, and wanted to do them so I could go back to doing what I find more interesting and challenging, programming.

This leaves me without much to fight against. The most concise way I can to think to phrase this is simply that I am interested in challenges beyond all else. If I were to win a lottery, I am getting painfully confident that very little would change with my day to day. I may do something stupid, like found a company, or something, but in general, I don’t think I have any real interest in changing my day to day. I want to be challenged, tested, and to keep growing.

Focus

Most concerning, after returning from my vacation, is my lack of attention span. I noticed my focus would flicker, so to speak. One moment I’d be digging into a challenge, then suddenly I am on a website, for God only knows what reason. I wasn’t switching mentally over to something else, productive, of course.

Perhaps focus is more of a muscle than a skill. Over the week, I’ve quickly regained most of my focus, but I can tell there’s more to go. The experience has made me wonder, if my ‘peak’ level of focus, is simply my own plateau, and if there’s more room to improve if I so choose to continue trying to improve my ability to focus on a topic for a long while.