In trying to process some recent events, I’ve been thinking about how you could possibly begin to represent the murky feeling of having to do tasks through a fog of grief using a text-based video game. I don’t have any clear reason why this is an idea I’ve had, but it’s been around for a while. I think it’s some combination of having played text adventures, having a little bit of programming experience, and learning about the Choice of Games ChoiceScript language.
My first programming class was a two week crash course in C++ and our “final project” was to build a little game using if statements and user input. If I remember correctly, the winning team built a game about running a lemonade stand and had an ASCII art sign that was generated based on your pricing inputs.
Looking back, it was an early example of what my career would turn out to be: I had some hacky self-taught HTML experience which put me in charge of leading a lot of our team’s development work, but I had never had a real programming class before like many of the interns on other teams. My work wasn’t great and since I was our most “experienced” coder, my team couldn’t troubleshoot it either. We built a little “choose your own adventure” game with multiple choice options, but for some reason, in our test run-throughs, only certain options would advance and the others would error out. I “drove” our presentation to the group and surreptitiously ensured that I was chose only the single pathway through the game that actually worked.
(Luckily for us all, I proceeded to have no interest in starting blood testing companies. I did wind up doing some social engineering work….)
When we pulled up the code to review, everyone thought it was neat except for our bootcamp instructor who asked how it was running when I had completely forgotten to use “else if” statements, or implemented them incorrectly, or something like that.
This is a roundabout way of saying: I’ve always figured out a way to put together what I need in order to get a job done, but I won’t be applying for software engineer work any time soon. I rarely build projects for myself for fun because the process is high-friction and involves having ten Stack Overflow tabs open at any time. For whatever reason, online coursework doesn’t click well with me at all – I think because I’m used to just hacking together code based on reading other people’s MySpace page source information and changing things until it looks right.
I recently started picking at this idea I’ve had, though, and I think I want to try outlining it in Python, and then if I’m still keen on it and have the general flow going, consider using it as my first exploration of the ChoiceScript language I mentioned earlier. Python is more useful in my work, so I’d like to take the opportunity to practice it more anyway.
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