Currently working on learning some Python, both for my own interest and in hopes that it will prove useful in my career. I decided to start out working on a kind of old school text adventure game. The project is both fun and interesting and already I’ve learned quite a few things (aside from the little bit of Python that I’ve learned from it).
- Everything that everyone tells you about learning to code is true: you learn more if you have a project you are working on. There are several reasons for this, motivation being the least of them; the biggest reason, in my opinion, is that having a project in mind will push you to stretch the limits of what you know and try new things.
- The guys who wrote the classic text adventure games were amazingly talented writers. It is really hard to make a game interesting when you are limited to text to convey everything. I’m doing text as a placeholder, but even so, it’s hard to strike the balance between evocative and tl;dr.
- The more details you have fleshed out about your setting & characters, even if you don’t convey 90% of it in-game, the richer your game will be. I started out with a seed idea and haven’t really done a lot of world building yet, and it shows.
I’m pleased with the amount of progress I’ve made in a short period of time and I’m looking forward to continuing to work on it. Right now my goal isn’t really to necessarily make something that I can share but mostly to explore some ideas and gain some knowledge of Python; if I do decide to share some of it I’ll post it here.
The main resources I’ve been using for this project have been reddit/gamedev and the tutorials at http://inventwithpython.com.
Originally published here.