Dawn of the Geeks

The main idea of The Most Rediculous Game Ever, is to create a product that a beginner programmer could put together in about a year. By beginner, I don’t mean one who has never programmed before. I mean someone who’s done some programming and is ready to start putting various complex concepts into one product. You have to learn how to program one concept at a time just like you have to learn anything one concept at a time.

I think that’s a key reason newbies run into trouble right away. They havn’t yet learned how to break problems down properly and so they think they can make a Quake 3 clone in a day. After all, you just slap some libraries together and voila! They don’t realize what it actually takes to program. Wolf5k is a relatively simple program. So what I’m doing is taking a “simple” program and building the level of complexity.

If you want to learn how to program I suggest taking an existing simple program and then breaking it apart and expanding on it. If you think Wolf5K is too advanced, there are simpler games out there.

My first big game was called “Cradle Quest.” It actually started as the “Big” program. I found this simple bit of code in a book. All it did was print text on the screen and then read it one pixel at a time and print it out scaled to be larger based on the value you enter. I took that and then expanded it so it could read only a section of the screen at a time. Then I added smooth scrolling. Eventually from that simple program I had a full top down 4 directional scrolling maze game written in QuickBASIC complete with animated sprites, cut scenes and an animated ending.

My first real experience coding was entering code from 3-2-1 Contact magazine and then modifying it. I also learned alot about how the code worked just by fixing typos. Which also taught me how to debug programs.

If you rush into complex projects you’re going to get overwhelmed. Start simple and then build in complexity.