Game Dev : insert title here lol 5/30

Confusion

What a day… Turns out this journey into game development is making me question my entire sense of free will. Do I only do things because the options are presented to me? Is that choice still an expression of free will? Have I been living life on tutorial mode?

I started off today feeling like I am at a deep reflection point.

If I am in the drivers seat and I am deciding what to do, then what do I want to do?

If I dont just accept the choices presented to me and decide to forge my own path then I find this to be a terryfying concept. It is equivalent to going off the edge of the map and no way to determine the “right” or “wrong” way to go since there are no more maps or guides.

When you have constraints and limits, these almost become a type of guide on where to go, based on what is possible.

But the moment you no longer have limits, the restraining wall is no longer guiding you through its resistance and the horizon is the limit. So where do you go if every direction is neither right nor wrong?

With no borders, every direction becomes a potential destination.

How on earth do you choose where to go? I am finding this concept of limitlesss freedom to be very challenging.

The reason why this is coming up now is a combination of some things in my personal life and the act of pushing myself through this challenge.

Acts of creativity have alot of freedom and it is similar to the problems I describe above.

• With a blank canvas, what do you decide to paint?
• With a guitar, what do you decide to play?
• With a code editor, what do you decide to program?

The answer is: whatever you want and this takes me to the core of my challenge, which is taking a personal turn.

How do I know what I want? Did I decide that I want something or only because it was suggested to me? Is it even possible to forge your own path without following the trails laid down by others?

Clarity

After some pondering, I have found my answer, at least for now.

I might be hesitating to head in any direction and the paradox of choice is petrifying (the origin of the word means to be turned to stone) but I can limit my scope, the same way I am doing for this game development challenge.

If the analogy of unlimited free choice is to be standing in a infinite dark field, then my solution here is to take a piece of chalk and draw a large circle around myself and select a smaller area to explore.

Within my self chosen limits, I will explore and document and map the area until I feel I understand the terrain enough to explore a but further, one piece at a time.

In reality, this looks like picking something and sticking to it. To focus, have discipline and keep my mind on a limited, clearly described goal. That is exactly what I am doing with this coding challenge. To select something small and limited, and document the things I find there.

Its strange because in it feels like starting this challenge and the prompting of these questions of self discovery is like the story of “The Alchemist”:

To dream of a treasure and set out into the world in search of it, only to discover that the entire time the treasure was beneath the bed where you had the dream.

I hope this writing is me actually contributing to the outcome of this challenge and not just an excuse to not be sitting here coding 😆 Jokes aside, it really is. It is me drawing my own map, as I explore my self chosen area, one bit at a time. I do think it has prompted some important questions already about free choice, the overwhelming and petrifying number of things we can chose from and looking within to understand what you really want.

Ok, so lots of waffling on about my feelings. How am I progressing with the game? Well, in our second major refactor in 24 hours, we have stripped the code away and taken some fundamental structure from the collide.p8 example set out by the pico-8 creator.

My current code effectively emulates the example written by Zep but I have removed alot of the unnecessary bits and it will be the foundation for future growth. I dont mind building on a solid foundation and trying to edit it further to suite my needs. Making changes means I understand it, and not that I am piggy backing on someone else hard work. To ensure I am solving my own new problems and not just that of a “follow me tutorial”, I am going to include a TODO list from each day.

TODO list:

1. Get the debug statements to stay on screen
2. Find out why the red ball flickers if I delete sprite 50
3. create a basic inventory system
4. need to make a HUD somehow that stays no matter which screen my character wanders into—

Alright, thats enough for now. Seeya tomorrow!