Re: Why do people still use bgt?
It's because the sighted gaming tutorials are written for the sighted, with graphics first. You have three paths into game programming:
1. Do a sighted gaming tutorial.
2. Learn to program and then come to games.
3. Grab BGT.
Problem with 1 is they go on and on about graphics and stuff, and you don't know that it's still applicable because surely audiogames are different. If you knew enough about programming to not fall into BGT you wouldn't fall into the trap of thinking like that but you don't so you do.
Problem with 2 is there's no motivation. Normal programming for the sighted, you get results easily. "Yay my web page is blue". "Yay it's an animated cat" or whatever. There's immediate win, even if it's not a game, you can take the web page you wrote to learn _javascript_ and show it to everyone. But if you're blind things stay theoretical for a very long time. If you want to do GUI you have to find an accessible thing, if you want to do web sites you can't show it off to anyone. Most people don't have the temperament to start at something like command line utilities forever, or JSON web services, or learning data structures, and most people can't look at an absurd salary in 5-10 years and let that motivate them either. You need the candy for lack of a better word.
So 3, grab BGT. BGT says "here, this is how you play a sound". The gaming tutorial teaches you bad practice. But you don't know enough to know that yet, and you immediately get a rewarding experience irregardless of the endgame potential. So you dive into BGT, anything that says anything otherwise is this giant hill because omg Python packaging and all those things that the sighted game tutorials like to try to teach that BGT doesn't even touch on, and because BGT you didn't learn how to Google or find resources on your own either because there are no resources to be found. So hack hack hack on a project, and then what, throw out all your work? It's like a black hole. All the skills and things you need to be able to get out, you didn't learn them, you can't because it's too niche, so you're stuck. This is one of the primary reasons I used to push so hard against it back in the day, for those who remember that.
And then, because audiogames.net is very small and very amateur, BGT being like a black hole sucked everyone in and the things that we needed to be building to have another more fully featured option never got built. So the last thing keeping people in BGT is, basically that everyone else is. No good option for audiogame physics in Python for instance, or anything else. The sighted stuff is too unconstrained. No good option for networking because the sighted stuff usually comes with a giant, inaccessible engine and can't be separated out. Etc. So unless you're skilled enough to invent the stack yourself or someone else has invented the stack for you, leave to what? And because BGT doesn't have resources to go beyond newbie levels of programming, get the skills to build the stack how?
My current mission, which will take a long time, is to finally build the pieces of the stack (starting with Synthizer, in many ways the hardest bit), moving to physics and networking, and then who knows where from there. To get rid of BGT once and for all, we need that and an equivalent to BGT's tutorial that shows you how to set it all up, maybe a project template or something.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
