Get to Work

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

(Disclaimer: this post isn’t meant to come off as a personal attack. At best I’m hoping it comes off as motivational, at worst as a grumpy old man moaning about the good old days.)

When I first started lurking on JGO, it was full of titans like Notch and Kev Glass and the Puppy Games guys. It was educational just to sit back and read their conversations as they talked about stuff they were working on, technical problems they were having, and the general cutting edge of Java game development. Sure, they also talked about other stuff, but the main focus was game development.

Some titans still hang out, and there are still some interesting posts here. But now it seems that kind of conversation is being drowned out by posts like this:

  • I’m thinking of making a Mario clone. What color shoes should he have? Post your favorite game shoes here!
  • I have no idea what to code. What should I code?
  • Wouldn’t this type of game be so cool? I’m definitely going to make it!

None of that is about actual development. At best it’s procrastination, but at worst it’s actively keeping you from accomplishing your goals. GET TO WORK.

“Well we all need to blow off some steam sometimes!” I get that. I really do. Sometimes you just want to talk about programming, and many of us don’t have IRL people who care about it like we do. You might want to just talk to somebody who gets as excited about programming as you do, but you don’t have anything much more specific than that in mind.

Get something more specific to talk about. Start working on that project you keep talking about. Post here when you accomplish something particularly interesting, or when you get stuck. Start participating in One Game a Month. Make posts about your actual progress, not just what you think you might want to do. Check out CompoHub for ongoing jams, and post your entries, not just a list of a hundred games that you haven’t started yet. Try out Processing. Experiment with Google Glass, or Spine, or something outside of game development, like digital art or data visualization. Do something interesting and post about it instead of making a post asking about how mechanics should work in a game you haven’t started yet.

What do you want to accomplish this summer? Get to work.

(okay now to start following my own advice)

#2

Hmm, I registered on JGO yesterday partly because people here seem happy to talk about the trivial stuff too.

I think games are supposed to be kind of trivial anyway - Notch and Kev Glass never cured cancer or anything :stuck_out_tongue:

#3

Gave you a medal good sir, the amount of procrastination is way too much in the forums.
Also, the number of trivial questions are starting to get way-way higher, like if people forgot how to use Google. There is no problem with asking about truly technical stuff, or discussing design patterns, etc. but when it comes to trivial questions, usually a 2 minute Google search results in a more detailed (and probably more accurate) answer than what we will write in days on the forum.
It would be great to see more of those beautiful WIP projects like Rayvolution’s Retro Pixel Castles, lastdigitofpi’s Xcylin, Longarmx’s 3D Randomly Generated World or orangepascal’s Gunslugs 2. There are more, but I just picked off a few that I found decent and they had recent updates. Personally I find WIP threads possibly the most inspiring resources for game development. :slight_smile:

#4

I wholeheartedly agree with you. :slight_smile:

I really don’t mine trivial posts here and there at all . . . hell in fact, sometimes they’re fun to just break away from the norm and talk about something random. But, a large majority of the threads popping up are going well beyond just a few trivial posts. I’d love to see more intellectual posts with more outside-the-box-questions like performance issues, pattern designs, and design hypothesis(made up term ftw). While the off “How many lines of code is your largest project?” threads here and there are fine, it just feels like those kinds of threads make up 90% of the new posts now a days. :frowning:

I think the biggest problem isn’t actually just the trivial posts, it’s the “middle school drama” posts that keep popping up. Like I said in those posts, this isn’t 4chan or middle school. :smiley:

I think a large part of this is the average age of JGO has dropped, because programming has become more accessible to people in their early teens (and that’s awesome!) but it’s having a backlash effect on these communities that used to be primarily people in their 20s or higher. It also doesn’t help that because thanks to Notch/Mojang, Java programming has become a huge focus for first-time programmers, because a huge amount of these 12-15~ year old kids are starting in on Minecraft modding. So, the next logical step is to go into full blown programming, and since they’re already somewhat familiar with the basics of java, they just stick with it.

#5

I hope your inspiring post kicks some lazy asses.

#6

According to social meda plaform observations, this thread has reached its critical mass of medals and will probably start to generate them faster and faster.

However, the thread types mentioned are not those that come to your mind at first.
Not the offtopic ones, no, they are just offtopic.
The threads that are actually talking about gamedev, but are just talk instead of actual development, these were mentioned.

EDIT: Not saying we don’t have to design the games to make them! God no!

#7

You !don’t deserve my medal.

#8

Please allow me to mention what also came to my mind: (I don’t even have to search):

  • Which sprite looks better?
  • I am also procrastinating!
  • How to move a group of sprites without using google? (nor my brain)
  • What’s with organized code?
  • How to remove … from our lives? (Typical 4chan where ray was talkin about)

My reaction to all this: Becoming a trolception and trolling even harder than the OP (for as far that is possible)
That’s my approach and probably why I posted tons more the past few weeks… I mean, if you agree to this, you also agree not to react seriously on all those (above mentioned) topics, do you. But there are ‘people’ (I once heard there were also cute robots here :P) that like to correct me there.

Go ahead and post all your ideas on your blog (oh wait nobody reads your crap, that’s why you came here, well java-gaming-blog.org doesn’t sound that bad).

#9

Herjan, example 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, not 7, only disagreed with Ray :slight_smile:

You edited your post? Okay, nevermind. Too lazy to make this a new one :slight_smile:

#10

Alright! Alright! I’m working!

Though seriously people, check out Processing if you’re just in a slump, the site even has embedded examples through Processing.js for instant interactive inspiration.
I knew of it but didn’t really think about it until recently, but now it’s definitely going to make it’s way into a project.

#11

Well, it’s a lot better than a few weeks ago, but there is still padded room for improvement.

#12

Just…stop. Please think of the children.