I am learning to love the feeling of finishing my work
I always struggled with seeing things through growing up; a bad habit that followed me into adulthood. I have started any number of projects (big and small) in my life that I've never finished. My favorite example is a project car I bought in 2012 that I never really got on the road and eventually gave away by the time I moved to Georgia this year (2020).
We start a lot of things in life and the last thing we want is for the only thing we finish to be the life itself. At least it's the last thing I want for myself.
This is partly why jumping into game design is scary for me: I'm clever and accomplished enough that if I fail at design/development it will 100% be because I chose not to finish what I started here. Being responsible for your own success is alluring. Being responsible for your own defeat is terrifying. But it's a dichotomy I'm tired of running away from. Design is not going to be my next project car.
Which brings me to this
I comprehend (the thesis of my last post) this code, but most importantly I completed the game that it was written for. It was a crappy platformer featuring a dragon that jumps and shoots fire, but it's complete and exists and I'm proud of myself for that.
What I enjoyed most about that project was how my comprehension of the details and the hard work allowed me a minimal amount of freedom to add my own details and make some of my own decisions. Instead of the fireball sprite Jason Weimann found online and used, I found an image and made my own sprites. Jason's dragon shoots fireballs, mine shoots lightning bolts. Jason's dragon shoots every time it jumps, mine jumps and shoots independently.
Jason's music track is fun and light, mine is dense battlemusic with beating drums and great crescendos that's far heavier than the cute graphics and high-pitched jumping sound effects would suggest.
I made decisions that made my game more mine than someone else's, and I finished the project after nearly 8 hours of work on it. (Not all at once).
What feels best about this experience is that I feel ready to take on the next one. I just have to figure out what that next one will be. For now, I will be working through a 3 part series on C# and .NET that I found on Udemy a while back. I really want to take advantage of the comprehension I've developed for coding and delve into the gritty details of programming before moving forward again.
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