I decided it would be a good time to talk about momentum. Or perhaps the total lack thereof. I’m a self-confessed fragile ego, especially when it comes to coding. I think this stems from a few issues I’ve got all at once, but the important ones are things like this:
I’ve never really finished any sizable project. For my own projects this makes a lot of sense. I have no deadlines, no audience, and no real driving motivation to finish anything. In other words, when I get sick of working on something, I just stop. After all, I’m sick of it, it got hard, or it got boring, and I don’t have to keep working on it.
One of the things I tend to enjoy is talking about my projects. I suppose that’s a fair bit of the reason for this blog. After a while, negativity or lack of interest or lack of feedback can result in loss of interest for me.
One of the specific issues I’ve been having with QubeKwest is that I hit a massive amount of serialization work and got buried in it. It’s really boring, and requires a lot of test code to make sure it’s working correctly. You can’t very well serialize a block and not get back the same block again later without all sorts of things going wrong.
Another issue is that I get fairly consistent feedback that I’m just wasting my time. I realize this project is essentially a clone of an existing game at the end of the day, and that I could code it faster by using someone else’s game engine, but the truth is that I don’t care. I’m doing this project for me, largely to give my brain something to do that requires education and devotion. Thus, I really don’t want to just make plugins for Minecraft or use someone else’s game engine. I want to learn how to write one and then, well, write one.
Now, I did just claim that I don’t care. Like five sentences ago in fact. While that is mostly true, the other truth is that I care a little. Enough in this case to have entirely stopped work on the project for about four months so far. Sure, it’s been fun playing World of Warcraft a lot, but I’m starting to get itchy about not coding, so I’m not sure how much longer I can go before I can’t stand it anymore.
Stay tuned, there may just be development updates again someday soon.