vivdunstan: Art work for the IF Archive including traditional text adventure tropes like a map, lamp, compass, key, rope, books a skull, and a sigh referring to grues (interactive fiction)
vivdunstan ([personal profile] vivdunstan) wrote2024-01-25 02:32 pm

Coding by playing

Back to Inform interactive fiction text adventure coding, and there's something really magical about trying early stages of the game myself as a player, thinking "This is the experience I want the player to have here", then coding it, replaying to try it out myself, tweaking and so on. Like alchemy! It is a phenomenally iterative process, and it does take time. But it's stupidly fun. I never had this much fun with programming during my computer science degree, when we learned loads of languages and IDEs. This is just brill.
a_cubed: caricature (Default)

[personal profile] a_cubed 2024-01-26 02:28 am (UTC)(link)
One thing that had changed between my undergrad in 88-91 and when I started lecturing in 2000 was that programming became more about building something real from as early as possible, at least where I was teaching. One way that was done at Reading was to provide substantial parts of a larger program pre-written for students and get them to add the functionality needing the parts of programming we wanted them to learn, then having them see something real come out of it.
andrewducker: (Default)

[personal profile] andrewducker 2024-01-26 10:36 am (UTC)(link)
It's always great to find something that clicks for you like that.