59 lines
7.2 KiB
Markdown
Executable File
59 lines
7.2 KiB
Markdown
Executable File
> Everyone has a different journey for how they were inspired to become a programmer.
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You know, when I decided to sit down and learn to code it was because I had just played a video game called [Thehttps://thepathless.com/ Pathless](https://thepathless.com). The Pathless* touched my soul in a way that was new to me. Something about the story, visuals, and my part in all of it really made me feel something new-- _inspiration_.
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I promptly decided I was going to be a AAA game developer. Imagine that, a 13 year old kid wasting a road trip on a video game and finding his life inspiration on a car the trip across a few states.
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I promptly sat down in front of a 2012 MacBook Pro (the only computer available to me at the time) and googled *"How to make video games"*. Well that was my first internet rabbit hole, I kept seeing terms like *Game Engine*, *3D design and animation*, and the most daunting of all; *Programming*. I was determined though, and a patchy vocabulary was not going to be the end of my moment of inspiration. I made a list of all the terms I didn't know and googled them separately.
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After a night of internetting I went to sleep excited. I still didn't know what a *game engine* was, but I certainly felt like I'd made progress.
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Bright and early the next day I began to research game engines until I felt like I understood what they were; I was pretty sure a game engine was the thing that took my idea for a game, and all my art and instructions on how it should run and made it into code for me. Perfect! I didn't really know how to code and I was fine with that.
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I downloaded Unity and got to work. ..For about 10 minutes and then I realized that this was not a software I could just fat fingers my way through and make sense of. Well reader, I called it quits then. I decided game design maybe just wasn't my thing and to study on more realistic goals for a 13yr-old.
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A few years passed, recently I has gotten back into writing and story creation-- i.e. I played a lot of DnD. I had been writing a lot of movie script-style short stories and really enjoying it, so I decided to start looking at cinematography. I had a Canon camera, so I did a lot of photography, I figured it would be a simple enough endeavor to start make short films.
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That failed. I just couldn't invest the time and effort to create something I was satisfied with, not to mention my continuous failure to meet my own standards just made me push myself away from that niche. Well, I thought, aren't animated movies a thing? Can I make short films on a computer? According to google, I could! I wasted no time redownloading Unity because the word *cinemachine* was too cool not to figure out how to use it. Well, history may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme. I found myself in the same predicament of not knowing how to make the application do what I wanted it to do. I gave up on Unity again, but my desire to create a game had grown again.
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I had recently played some games by [Appsir Games**](https://www.appsirgames.com), and I remembered seeing somewhere that they used a game engine called Buildbox. Well, I looked it up and learned all about no-code-tools. History rhymes like a motherfucker and so the download, open, have-no-idea-what-I'm-doing cycle repeated.
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This time however, I stuck it through and watched some videos. Not much, I build a little driving obstacle-course simulator and sent it to my gamer friend as an unsigned EXE (The next 20 minutes were a frantic Discord call of me pleading with him to open it, and him saying his PC was saying it was untrusted).
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That one simple experience turned into more complex game projects until finally, it happened. I ran into a problem I couldn't fix with nodes. I found a snippet of code on some forums somewhere on the internet and it worked, so I kept working on my new game project.
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Something kept nagging me though; amidst all these nodes and networks, there was a little snippet of code making it all work *and I had no idea how*. This bothered me more than I expected so I sat down and began reading the 20 lines or so. I read them again and again, and looked up the words I didn't know until I did.
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It worked, and I began to understand what I was reading, and it was *fascinating*. These twenty lines of code were doing things I would have spent hours dragging nodes to achieve.
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I was set, it was time to learn to code, and nothing could stop me now.
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I took my mom's 2014 MacBook Air that she'd just gotten for college and downloaded the Swift Playgrounds app.
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The following month, I spent most nights dragging little blocks and snippets of code to solve the puzzles presented to me.
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I didn't learn how to code from that app, but it did teach me what if statements are, what a function is, and most importantly, it imprinted DRY into me as my first experience of code design.
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Once I finished with Swift Playgrounds, I wanted to do something big. Make an app, a video game, *something*. But the problem was, I knew what my code should do and how, I just had no idea what to actually type.
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In that same area of time, was my first month of freshman year in highschool. We had an assignment to pick a dream of ours and see how close we could get to realizing it in a month.
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I told them I wanted to make a text-adventure game like [Zork](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork) (which I absolutely loved, but had never actually beaten).
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The school issued me an old MacBook (they were everywhere when I was a kid), and I got to work. First, I had to find some way to teach myself code. I figured YouTube was a great place to start only the school had most content streaming platforms blocked on the network. I actually managed to find an old archive of this guy explaining the fundamentals of C# that wasn't blocked so I decided my game would be written in C#.
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I spent about a month watching about 2 hours of lecture a day + coding along,
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and by the end of it, I had done it! I had a C# text-adventure game! It only had 5 choices, and no real ending, and sometimes it just broke, but still! I had done it!
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That rush of dopamine, the satisfaction of a (semi)working program was all it took to fall down the rabbit hole.
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I asked my family for a Codecademy subscription for Christmas and took their Python course. Then, I took their HTML and CSS course. Then their JS course and you get it. I ate it all up trying to get as much knowledge as possible continuously.
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That cycle repeated until I fell into tutorial hell. The way I got out of that was by getting programming books, actually. My dad got me a book about the command line from NoStarchPress***, and it taught me so much.
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Now, I've progressed much in my quest for knowledge, but I often feel like I'm walking up the infinite spiral staircase from the Phantom Tollbooth, always moving, always learning, and yet no closer to the end at all.
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---
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> \* A genuinely amazing game, check it out if you have time. About 4 hours to beat normally, about 12 hours worth of content and open-world exploration if you want to 100% the game.
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> \** An incredible indie developer who spits out some of the only platformer adventure games I've had the patience to play through (in fact I've played most of their games more than a few times. It's a monthly ritual for me).
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> \*** Any book from NoStarchPress will teach anyone tons, I never get bored of their stuff. |