Some Inspiration, Perhaps

I’m not really a programmer.

I came into One Game a Month as primarily a game designer, with a little background in scripting and light programming. This is a large part of why I chose Love2D for my first game, since it uses Lua, one of the languages with which I have some facility.

So maybe you’re reading this, and you’re not a programmer, and you think this thing is overwhelming. Well, use One Game a Month to inspire you. For all the time I’ve spent reading how-to’s on programming and perusing books and tutorial websites, the most value I got was from getting in there and writing some code, which before this month was only occasional, but is now almost  daily.

I still am not really a programmer, but I’m getting better at it. And this week, I haven’t had tutorial windows open side-by-side with my code windows, I’ve just had Lua code windows and my brain, and I’ve solved some problems using those tools. With a couple of weeks of working at it every day.

If there’s one thing I know I’ll gain from the One Game a Month experience, it’s that — experience. I’ll have done something. I’ve done NaNoWriMo before (although I can’t imagine doing that 12 times in a row) and this is kind of similar.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot, further updated from the last one. I just spent more time than I thought I had creating a fog-of-war type effect for the game. I realize that I could’ve probably looked up a snippet somewhere for this, but I’m proud for solving it myself, even if my solution ends up being less than elegant.

Beautiful, isn’t it?

Now get to work.