Sunday, May 23, 2010

iteration

I put up a new build a bit ago, but you probably won't notice any differences. All th changes are under the hood. I'm rooting through and cleaning up code as I go. Bad shit goes out and slightly improved shit goes in.

This is all part of the iterative process.

Also being iterated, are all the graphics. The final look will hopefully be somewhere between story book paintings and slick art deco design. Figure that out... I haven't.

At the moment I am relearning some art tools that I used to be quite proficient at. I always spend so long between using certain tools that I almost always forget some of the most basic things about them. Every time that happens, it always reinforces this one theory in my brain. I think that a person can become an expert on a topic or at some skill, extremely quickly. Most individual skills can be picked up and developed in a matter of months, or even weeks. If you work on them continually for 1 or 2 years, you will most likely be an expert. Becoming a master will probably take the rest of your life, but becoming an expert... thats a pretty quick.

Only thing is, I don't think most people see it that way. I've had so many wildly different jobs in a fairly short period of time, that I have been forced to pick up new skills, become and expert in some, and then drop them to pick up an entirely new set of skills. Most of these skills are either so encrusted with rust that it would take a few weeks to get back up to speed, or they have been flat out forgotten.

Right now I'm learning to program in C#. If I kept at it, in a few years I would probably be an expert in whatever I was programming. That's not me being cocky, I think it really is just a matter of time and exposure to the task. If you ask me right now, I'm really not sure if I'll keep at it or not. I would definitely rather steer more heavily toward the art. Right now, I think I'll go reacquaint myself with some tools I used to be an expert in.

2 comments:

  1. I think there is a fundamental difference in knowing a language and being able to write good software. Learning a language is quick and easy as you say, but this does not make someone an expert. Being an expert means you can architect and write code that others can not only follow, but also extend easily. This means using patterns and there tricks of the trade.

    I am software developer by trade (for IBM) and I meet so many people on the street who tell me they can program in some-old-language.

    Anyone can write buggy, spaghetti code which gets the job done.

    Not saying this is you - but I guess I always get my back up when I read something that reminds me of this.

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  2. So far so good. Don't see anything wrong or buggy from what I saw. As far as the game goes its hard to understand how the score is calculated based off of the result. I don't know what you had planned for doing that.

    Other then that the game took me about 2 minutes to completely understand and really get into it. So so far so good.

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