vivdunstan: Art work for the IF Archive including traditional text adventure tropes like a map, lamp, compass, key, rope, books a skull, and a sigh referring to grues (interactive fiction)
vivdunstan ([personal profile] vivdunstan) wrote2024-01-25 02:32 pm

Coding by playing

Back to Inform interactive fiction text adventure coding, and there's something really magical about trying early stages of the game myself as a player, thinking "This is the experience I want the player to have here", then coding it, replaying to try it out myself, tweaking and so on. Like alchemy! It is a phenomenally iterative process, and it does take time. But it's stupidly fun. I never had this much fun with programming during my computer science degree, when we learned loads of languages and IDEs. This is just brill.
a_cubed: caricature (Default)

[personal profile] a_cubed 2024-01-26 02:28 am (UTC)(link)
One thing that had changed between my undergrad in 88-91 and when I started lecturing in 2000 was that programming became more about building something real from as early as possible, at least where I was teaching. One way that was done at Reading was to provide substantial parts of a larger program pre-written for students and get them to add the functionality needing the parts of programming we wanted them to learn, then having them see something real come out of it.