Actually got past newbie gamedev programmers block last night

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

My revelation:
I have been picking at Killer game programming in java, developing games in java, 2nd edition of Beginning Game programming with Java for months and I’ve found that their code examples give me errors or deprecated messages. This has made me frustrated and confused. What I have decided is that until my third edition java se6 game programming (because I cannot find a torrent for it anywhere) finally comes in, I will be just dealing with the deprecated libraries. I think this is important for anyone who is having problems running any of the codes in the examples. I think that as long as you are scared of code being marked as deprecated you won’t finish any of the examples. This means that you will never make progress and learn the core techniques.

My recommendation for anyone else who feels as if they cannot get past the start of learning process:
Worry about hacking something up as quick as you can so that you can feel the motivation of starting a new project. Don’t worry about out of date resources and deprecation errors. If you come across an example that uses .clone() (since it is private now the code won’t compile) don’t get frustrated and look for another book, just look up how to fix it, chances are other people are having the same problems and a quick google search will make you feel like you’ve overcome something. Switching books and tutorials doesn’t help. Read a book and let it inspire you to tinker with the examples and it’ll take you farther than any complaining.

Remember:
There are people who don’t work as hard as you working as java game developers full time that have no interest in it and can perform adequately, don’t get squashed by old texts as who cares if you need to do a quick search and write 4 more lines to get something to compile on java se6.

You all can do it and so can I.

#2

Those are good messages, thanks for posting them here. I generally agree with you - I like to see results fast so I rarely spend time reading a book. Then again, my underlying knowledge of every programming language I know is relatively spotty, whereas someone like Riven who reads a lot of materials on how things work has a master’s knowledge of the JVM.

So really I’d say just do whatever works best for your brain.

#3

Congratulations! I wish i could show more enthusiasm but text has it’s limitations. i hope to surpass newb levels as well :smiley:

#4

Thanks guys! I just fear that their may be others. I’d write a development blog but I find that I type how I think and I am certain that I would get torn down by grammar nazis.

#5

Well, I’m not exactly a newb anymore, although I feel like one sometimes.

Encouraging to read some positive words :slight_smile:

#6

That’s pretty sound advice. Thanks for the post. :slight_smile:

#7

Thats a very VERY good point. Those books youve mentioned have caused me WEEKS of frustration. My thoughts on it is to just find a simple tutorial, I mean simple! Something that just shows you how to get an image animated across the screen. If you can do that, you can build on top of it to make a game. At a beginners level, there is no need to dive into these books. KGPIJ spends an entire chapter just on how to create certain frames per second. I say just do it how you want, you can always learn and fix it later when you hit a wall.

#8

You hit the nail on the head. I wonder how many others are victim to this folley!