A guide to perseverance

Expert (126)

28-04-2021, 18:14

A great project is like a great story, where different characters meet and share a great adventure, but everyone has their own life to tell from which to create other amazing stories, then other projects.

Por albs_br

Champion (467)

28-04-2021, 18:52

Very good advices, with a few adapattions they ar useful for anyone, and in other contexts too.

Quote:

19. Invest in tooling: Code your tools first. It will speed up alot of your problems. Putting objects painstakingly by hand is the most demotivating task in the universe. Create mass converters and tools to output your map and objectlists on the fly.

The problem I see here is: sometimes you need to finish the engine to make the tools, but the tools accelerate the development of the engine, then you make the tools and the engine gets modified later and you have to rebuild the tools... It's a trade off. I'm pretty sure XKCD has a comic strip for this situation...

Por ToriHino

Paladin (826)

28-04-2021, 19:00

For me it certainly helps to show parts of the projects that are working to someone else and already get good feedback on it. Even if it are indeed only the very first steps and hardly anything actually is working (just make sure the one who is looking at it or testing also understands this ). And yes, perseverance in the end is the only thing that makes finished projects.

Por snake

Resident (64)

29-04-2021, 16:50

I started coding a few years ago, and i'm progressively realizing it's a real nightmare.
I had to study lot of harsh documentation (as 9938 or memory configuration) and write tons of non-working code before to get results, and i also had to bother people from here several times.
Now i'm stuck with Msx Music programming, i have to find a solution for tempo (i write pieces with Musescore, then i use a personal tool to convert them to sequences of YM2413 registers values).

Retrocoders really deserve respect, even if their releases are imperfect or artwork is not like a Picasso painting, or system requirements exceed our favorite home setup.

My only remark is why they don't release sources. It would be very logical on a hobbyist context as retrogaming. Interest on their works would be boosted by acquiring a big educational value.

Por thegeps

Paragon (1175)

30-04-2021, 01:43

Well, the author of this post released his sources... and I'll do the same after my game is published... and as I know ARTRAG and Santiontanon as well did the same: they pointed me to their sources to learn how to do SAT reversing for flickering routine (ARTRAG, Uridium) and how make enemies' aiming bullets (Santiontanon, XSpelunker). And there are more sources out there: Santiontanon uses them to test his assembler optimizer... just ask, here's plenty of coder ready to help you

Por Wolverine_nl

Paragon (1160)

30-04-2021, 09:42

I only finished 1 tool, not even in assembly lolz, GR8cfg. And I have started 3 other projects in asm the last 3 years, and still no finish line.
Very good read! I will pick one project to focus on and hang up some posters in my project room with some of these texts

Por pizzapower

Master (151)

01-06-2021, 17:25

Manuel wrote:

i have also seen people getting lost in writing supporting tools (editors etc.) and when the tool is done, they never really get to start or continue on the game... coding the tool is probably easier (in modern language), but the game requires a bit more perseverance

I think it helps if you start with small tools that do only one thing and do it well. For instance a python script that converts PNG images into asm, C or BASIC data. Although we already have tons of those.

Por Grauw

Ascended (10706)

01-06-2021, 17:20

Yeah I think those kind of tools are perfectly fine and I would even recommend to create, it can really help optimise your workflow and data structures.

Getting lost in tools is more about creating big editors with a GUI. I remember on one of my first game projects back in the early 2000s, that I spent a lot of time creating a tile editor on MSX, and got kind of tired out when actually working on the game code afterwards. Then again, in those days, I didn’t really have an alternative, I don’t think there are any (16x16) tile editors for MSX.

Although I have written conversion tools that took a lot of time as well.