The moment you fell in love with scripting?

Fell in love is kind of an exaggerated term, but do I love scripting A LOT. It is kind of like your mother that disciplines you in the most harshest way; however, you end up as the most civilized person in society. At first, I wanted to take my 800 dollar piece of machinery and throw it out the window, but with enough time and patience, you will understand the system and how it works. When my friends and family ask me to teach them, I tell them that all I can do is show you the language its' up to you to decide whether or not you want to develop a skill for it through trial and error. So I thought to create a thread where people can express there experiences and how they came to be as a very knowledgeable in scripting as this could potentially create better programmers as well, I will go first.

My first time? I was watching a series of Youtube videos explaining the basic know-how of scripting. One of the Youtube content creators, Brackey's, was really good at scripting, and I followed his make-a-game series as well as a couple of videos of Survival series. When I thought I got enough practice, I thought I knew everything there was to scripting. I, of course, was #$%@ing wrong. Which will be leading into.....

What was the first time you wanted to break your baby(your computer)? When I thought I knew everything with scripting, I started making my own scripts with my own game. My objective that I set for my self was to create an animation every time the player goes through the sphere collider of the particle system. I had OnTriggerEnter in mind and thought that is all I needed as a couple of other lines of code just to make it work. I tried, I tried, and I freaking tried. A couple lines of code ended up being a bunch of useless line of code. Let's just say I didn't understand what type variables are and how they are used; let alone how to start an animation after a certain action is taken. My original script that was driving me nuts was:

HarnessAnimation : AnimationClip;
HarnessObject : GameObject;

FunctionOnTriggerEnter (info : Collider)
{
if(info.tag == "Player")
{
animation.Play(HarnessAnimation);
Destory(HarnessObject, 7);
}
}

I thought since Function OnTriggerEnter was the if factor as to when the object moves through the collider, the action will happen. The animation did play, but the Destroy Object was not working. Why? Because I needed to place an if statement on the animation.Play. Both of these functions were running at the same time and I needed the GameObject to be destroyed after the animation started 7 seconds prior as which how long the Animation played. Once I got that piece figured out, it was a home-run for me.

When was the time you fell in love with scripting? Well, I would say that every time I at least got to have that bit move and do something, while I was the one that created that on my own learning along the way of my mistakes, that would be the time I fell in love with scripting and don't regret trying things long and hard in the process. It's kinda like dark souls where you know the game is hard, and you are ready to break your keyboard; until, you finally beat a boss and pass the level.

 

I think it was the first time I spawned 1000 cubes, all with random positions, rotations, scales and colors, at the click of a button.

 

I don't think I like doing it much but I'm a jaded creature.

 

Im with this other old guy.

 

Funny .. I know you mean it generically but I would insist on saying " when was the moment you fell in love with programming" .. not scripting

Scripting implies a lot of things like batch file scripting, little javascript snippets on web page etc. I do find those fun and interesting - but I've never felt passionate about them.

Now for programming on the other hand .. the first time I got an array of sprites to line up in a grid on my screen ... right then

 

When I got my console to tell me a joke. Literally all it did was tell a joke and the answer. No interaction. It is still till this day one of the best games I have ever made. Better than the Last of Us.

 

It takes a special type of person to enjoy writing code.
I was taking a couple college courses on the fundamentals of C and C++ for a Computer Science degree when I found that writing the simple programs was actually "fun" to me. The courses and projects came extremely easy to me and in turn I was able to explain things to my classmates at our low knowledge level; That was 10-12 years ago and never touched programming again other than looking at other peoples code but I had always had that desire to learn more.

I've tinkering with Unity/Blender on and off for the past ~3 years and all of that was going through tutorials. I feel into a nasty trap by doing that; I became entirely too dependent on those GD tutorials that when I sat down to start something new, I would draw a huge blank, get pissed, convince myself I had no clue what I was doing and drop all effort for awhile. I wasn't until this past January (wife and kids were away for a few months) that I sat down and forced myself to create something.... It didn't happen but I got a lot of prototyping, trial and errors, and my own functional code working. It was that feeling of great accomplishment and reward you get after several hours of researching, reading the Unity manual, writing and rewriting code and finally making an object or function do exactly what you wanted it to do, that I realized I loved writing this code.

At the time I was working on "the idea that made me decide to try game development". It's a House of the Dead type game on touch screen. I was working on the path between waypoints, raycasting shots and spawning enemies. It was my first real attempt to create something of my own and not with a tutorial. I got the prototype working somewhat but my lack of coding and game dev knowledge was weighing heavy on me so I decided to stop and start something with far less mechanics and moving parts. =)

 

Indeed, I prefer to write scripts to do my coding for me.

 

Similar to this... Except mine was when I got the console to sing the song "100 bottles on the wall". It was like magic and I was the wizard!

 

Getting the result I desired is when I fell in love as well.

 

never!

 

Honestly, I think I fell in love with scripting about at the point of "Hello World" on my Commodore 64...

 

Ever since my humble beginnings with Game Maker, I have liked programming.
But it wasn't until creating my first triangle in OpenGL, that I came to love it.