Thursday, March 4, 2010

I'm doing it again.

WARNING: wall of text coming without pictures and with too much philosophical crap.
   Damn, I thought I knew better than doing an editor system without planning everything beforehand. Every session I have programming it get's to be a bigger clusterfuck than before. However I do wonder if I'm actually doing the right thing. Last time I started jamming code without planning it through,on the December LD,everything got FUBAR, and I had to scrap lots of it in order to be able to make anything, but I have also learned tons of little tricks that helped me out before. Programming without having a concrete plan, with just having a vague Idea in mind, actually6 is lots of fun since you make things up as you go.
When I studied animation (by myself) I learned there are two kinds of animation. One of them is drawing as you go and the other is by doing keyframes and interpolating between them. The second one gives good results by being pre-thought, however it gives boring results, the first one however when you're animating as you go it's a lot more entertaining to animate and gives interesting results and livelier characters but tends to miss the marks and is in general unorganized. A good animator uses both of those styles to get the best results, and I'm thinking if it isn't the case with programmers too.
   Maybe programming stuff without pre-planning everything and then scraping most of the code but keeping the interesting stuff can become my way of doing things? Sure it wastes a lot of time but it also gives good results! When the entity system was in such a stage and scrapped everything I did learn a lot more than I expected, and you learn the most when you fail, so it might be possible I'll learn something even if I know beforehand something is gonna eventually fail.
That's all for today. Cya!
~Spliter

1 comment:

  1. I totally agree, very insightful. I find that the only way to do it is to just blindly go ahead and start coding, but make sure you spend time frequently going back and cleaning up what you've written.

    As long as you do this frequently it's not a huge deal and doesn't become an overwhelming task like it would if you left it to the end of a project.

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