Re: trying to solidify my understanding of coding concepts, and failing
The problem is that BGT's perspective entirely comes from new programmers, on a site where we consider said aforementioned Bopit clones to be the height of entertainment. There's a culture here of "I put out a game and that's amazing", coupled with this sort of self-perpetuating thing where when you do that you get a ton of feedback that's positive, the negative feedback gets shot down, and then there's this belief that whoever is trying to learn right now is about to write the next Swamp or Shades of Doom. Programming competently usually takes intentionally deciding that you're going to learn to program competently rather than just hammer and hammer and hammer away at your game. The BGT dev approach is instantly gratifying but then takes way, way longer because you're not actually going out and learning the thing. We've got lots of devs here who consider the project more important than the skill. They all end up in the same place and this is very much not hypothetical. Point being, you're on the right track having realized that you need to learn the thing, and that you're not learning the thing, but the last step is realizing that BGT isn't an environment in which it is possible to learn the thing. It's hard to articulate what the thing is, other than that you're right to think that you're missing the thing, and have identified it for yourself pretty accurately,.
You say you're into music. Some people are talented at music and can sit down at a keyboard and be Mozart in 5 minutes. But I bet music took you a long time. Don't feel bad if programming does. Programming is at a weird intersection of art, science, and project planning. You have to learn to be creative, and also to work within the rules, and also how to manage really huge projects before they run away from you.
Anyway, for an idea of what's available outside BGT: this is old and Python 2, but goes into game design up to and including networking. Probably a bit beyond where you are now. How about an entire page of game algorithms? That last one links out to a *ton* of stuff in various languages. I thought I had more, but it's been a long time and apparently I lost my bookmark folder. But that should give you a taste, and you can go find tons and tons of resources with Google; pick one that, I hate to use something as cliche as speaks to you but there's no better way to put it.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
