Have you ever struggled for weeks on how best to design a system in your game?

And made multiple failed coding attempts to solve a problem? I hate when things take that long to get organized in my brain, and sadly those problems seem to happen more and more as I get older. But damn, when things finally come together and you *know* you've arrived at the right solution... not many feelings in the world better than that.

 

Have any of use failed at coding? The question should be " how many hundreds of times has coding caused a problem for you"

 

Its called iteration. To quote Thomas Edison - "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

If you don't enjoy and learn from your failures as much as your successes, you probably shouldn't be coding. Coding involves far more getting it wrong then it does getting it right.

 

Agree with @BoredMormon seems just the normal process really. I don't see any failure involved.

You design something you start implementing and through the act of that have a stronger connection to the problem and perhaps see a pitfall you didn't see to begin with or an otherwise better solution.

Explorative programming, prototyping, iteration whatever you want to call it. Part of the process.

Two weeks for a system could be quite reasonable depending on exactly what the system is. "System" doesn't tell anything as far as complexity & scope are concerned.

 

Every system I implement is basically--

Implement system in code
"Play" game or software
Try to run system
Read error
Go to code, resolve error
Repeat

 

I know exactly what you mean.
But to put it in a positive light, I don't think these are 'problems' really as you get older/more experienced. When you are younger and have less experience with something, you simply have fewer options due to lack of knowledge and practical application. It is much easier to get organized when you only know a couple of ways of doing something. With experience you have a lot more knowledge to draw on, and a better understanding what choices will lead you to what results in different scenarios. Programming was way easier back when I was young and jamming everything in one big file, blissfully ignorant of concepts like OOP and such.

Just think of your organizational challenges as the burden of wisdom.

 

I think I solved this mostly by not thinking too far ahead. I mean I'd think so far ahead I'd still be doing peripheral problems that support the solution rather than just going for something that barely works then using the full power of hindsight. In other words... let there be two passes on everything that matters.

When I was a kid and a teen, I solved things far better than I do now, far faster. Sadly. Haha. I have experience now to offset how rubbish I've become though, so there's that.

 

You are just getting started. There is a whole world of bugs after you finish with the errors. Next you get 'there are no errors, but it doesn't do what its supposed to'. Then you have 'its working, but its far to slow'. Then you release it to an actual player and they manage to find a thousand edge cases you hadn't thought of.

 

Haha, that's perfect.

 

That is true. I tried to do a game mod once and designed this awesome room where the player could see a staff in a cage, but had to traverse the room and back to open the cage. I put it front of s play tester who quickly informed me all he had to do was reach through the bars and take the staff. I just assumed a player couldn't reach through be cause I never thought of trying it. Had to redesign half my room.

I must of played the room a hundred times before having it play tested and there was only three bugs, all of which were players doing something I never expected. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere.

 

I usually run in a cycle of breaking my back to get stuff together, then finally being done, riding that high, then letting that high turn to a sense of dread when I compile a to-do list, then that dread turns to despair, then I screw off a little to blow off steam, then I screw off too much because I'm burnt out, then I eventually get sick of myself and my poverty and force myself through the next step sixth months later.

 

That sounds very, very familiar.