Research = Progress

Or, at least, that's what I am going to advocate to make up for the fact that I have, again, spent too much time gaming and not enough time programming.

Damn you, World of Warcraft. Why must you have addicted me to your schemes again?

When I'm not reading about WoW or scrolling endlessly down my Facebook news feed, I do actively try to find more things about programming to investigate. Yesterday, my search was somewhat accidentally rewarded, simply by visiting Humble Bundle.

For anyone not familiar with Humble Bundle (seeing as I had no idea it existed just a few months ago), this is a company who gathers together collections of games, software, or books and provides them in this "pay what you want" scheme. Some of the money you pay goes to the providers of these materials (publishers, developers, etc.), some goes to Humble Bundle in the form of a "tip", and some goes to charity. Because you can choose how much you want to pay, you can also choose who gets each piece of your proverbial pie of money.
It's a pretty neat platform. Most of the games are only redeemable through Steam, and the books are often Hi-Res PDFs that you must download, but there have been some fantastic bundles lately.

The one that caught my attention this week was actually a bundle of rarities from Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite authors of all time. After snatching that bundle up, I was nosing around and noticed the weekly bundle included a piece of software called GameMaker.

Let me distract myself for a moment by saying that the way I've been training myself to code is pretty down and dirty. I use Sublime Text to write and GCC/Clang to compile. Sometimes I make a Makefile for the little programs I come up with, but most of the time, it is good ole' gcc name.c -o name.
I have never worked with an engine before, and even if GameMaker isn't the greatest engine out there, the price was certainly right for me to get started with it (the bundle came with assets already, in addition to source code from projects made in GameMaker that are already on the market).

Researching GameMaker brought me to a developer called MoaCube who wrote up this review on GameMaker prior to the release of GameMaker Studio, which is the software included in the Humble Bundle. It was nice to see a developer who had projects out there in the nebulous space of the internet marketplace give a candid look at the engine and relate their experiences.
MoaCube has some really gorgeous-looking games that I look forward to investigating more closely. The review article goes into some detail about the games they built with GameMaker.

So I went ahead and picked up the bundle with GameMaker in it. The way I figure, if nothing else, I can root through some code and have real, working games to compare with any tweaks I might make.

Of course, because there have been 60,000+ bundles sold, the company website, YoYoGames.com, is experiencing huge latency issues and ultimately needed to go offline for maintenance, so I can't actually comment on GameMaker because I have yet to get my hands on it.

Since this is the case, I'm going to truncate this post for now and come back to the subject of GameMaker later. It is not the only research I've done, and this particular research led me on another tangent of research, but I think that may be best tackled in a completely separate blog post. Plus, I have work to do and this post ended up long enough as it is.

It's Almost 5 o'Clock...

....Which means I'm fiending for my commute home so I can work on other things.

Things that I need to do:

1. I need to kick myself in the ass and stop using my shitty modem as an excuse to not work on my project. I have an Amazon Web Services server running a guild website for my GW2 guild (which has been painfully inactive lately). I should just load it up there and use that instance as a host.
2. Once I'm done kicking myself in the ass, I need to break the damn code I've been pouring over so I can see what errors I can cause and, consequently, fix.
3. I also need to continue working through the programming projects in the textbook I have (yes, that one written by K.N. King that I was working out of ages and ages ago). I post my progress on these on GitHub. I think I mentioned that last week sometime.

I was working on one project that had a do loop in it, but my logic was obviously flawed, as the loop fired infinitely. My biggest question about loops has to do with the variables... And I may post up a thought process about them so I can work out the details of how they work. I'm thinking once I have that down, loops will come much easier to me.

Also on my list: working out some actual form of balance and continuity for the project I'm working on. I have a lot of features that I want to add to the base code I have and not much in the way of structure for adding them. There are huge-scope projects, like a different login system, and not-so-huge-scope projects, like adding in a racial selection menu to character creation. Content is taking a seat on the back burner until I can get some other details in place, but I've already printed up some material that should help me with that once I can spare the time to work on it.

Now, if WoW would stop sucking up all my time, I'll be in good shape.... *starts chanting "I'm not addicted" softly, feverishly*

Anecdotal Advice

My tunes for the night. This soundtrack is so amazing. The game is great, too. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I look forward to playing the second game the same studio produced and released recently, called Transistor.

I promise I didn't come here to babble about video games, much as I'd like to. Instead, I want to babble about the furthering of ones' knowledge and skill.

This has been a recent discovery for me. I described it when I first felt it as "a desire so strong to achieve a goal that the relatively unenjoyable steps that need to be taken along the way are no longer unenjoyable". When I questioned my fiancé on what a feeling like that could possibly be, he merely named it "motivation". That's when I realized that I had not been truly motivated to do something for a very long time. Long enough to forget what it felt like.

That was in 2011. At the time, the feeling applied to my artwork, which I was using as an outlet for brainstorming a story that Andrei and I were working on together. I became enamored with the concept of MUDs after being introduced to one, and in 2012, I spent all of my time learning as much as I could about them. The desire I had to learn about them made me voracious for any information I could find, though it was quite thin by the time I started looking (most MUD information was out-of-date by 2007, with the massive popularity of emerging MMOs at the time). As I learned more about MUDs, I only became more fascinated by them. The majority of the old codebases were written in C, so I took the natural next-step and picked up C to try to fully understand them. The knowledge certainly helped when I started trying to script short programs into the MUD I build for!

Progress on that front has been halting, thanks to several projects I have on my plate that have been vying for priority. Now that I've made the overall decision to focus on HTML/CSS, I feel the same motivation driving me forward when I get stuck. I've grown to call it "possibility", personally. If I give up on whatever I'm working on, the possibility of anything coming of it will die. And, really... Anything is possible.

But, enough broad anecdote. What does that kind of motivation look like? Outside of the forward-driving force that is ones' own motivation, it looks something like this:

• Scouring shelves at bookstores for used and new books that could hold useful information
• Hunting for online resources; magazines, white papers, newsletters, blogs... anything.
• Stepping away from the games or TV shows a little earlier at night to fit a little bit of reading in before bed
• Keeping a digital copy open on the phone/tablet/computer on the off-chance that a 15-minute span of time pops up to allow for some quick reading
• Writing a lot of code
• Making lots of mistakes
• Reading or talking about those mistakes and finding industry advice on how to avoid them
• Making more mistakes, and hopefully, some visible progress

At least, that's what it looks like for me. I was lucky enough to stumble upon a used book published in 2004 for $6 that focuses on web standards for HTML and CSS. Inside, the author made heavy reference to his blog, so I went to see what he had to say. The blog hadn't been updated in a year or so, but even so... Thankfully, HTML and CSS haven't changed too much in the past 10 years, and the changes that have been made are very helpfully documented on the W3Schools Website. With that being the case, this blog is a fount of information. Additionally, the author often references a great deal of other resources. While reading through his blog, I found myself bookmarking every other page I visited for the quality of content I read. Some things were a little confusing, being marketed to web designers who have been in the industry for years. But, that unenjoyable feeling of being confused? It didn't last long when I reached a point in those articles when things began making sense. If I had given up and decided to come back when I had more experience, I'd have robbed myself of the opportunity to understand. It took more effort to continue reading something I legitimately didn't get, but the payoff was far greater.

This has been an incredibly rambly way of explaining why it's a bad idea to give up. If something seems out of reach, there are times that you give yourself an excuse to not work as hard. It is tough to keep the motivation going. But to throw the towel in because something is too hard or you don't get it is the wrong approach -- instead, figure out why it's too hard or why you don't understand, and go from there. And if that is way too much work, then start asking yourself if you've chosen the right thing to take up your time.

Some of the HTML/CSS references I found are listed below, for anyone interested. I wish all a wonderful night or day, whichever the case may be.

---

• SimpleBits.com Archive (aforementioned Blog)
• A List Apart
• ImpressiveWebs
• Smashing Magazine