I feel silly typing this, being years deep into the project and admitting this, but i haven't kept it SeaCrit that I'm not primarily a coder, and I don't talk about coding much because i just kinda pick it up as I go. Well yesterday I migrated to a new version of visual studio and I was curious what new features these things have. Well I ended up down a rabbit hole watching YouTube videos on keyboard shortcuts for coding and that elephant in the room started to show itself that i try t tune out and that's that I'm new to this code business, I have no formal training, I've never worked with competent coders on code, and my existing code base that i contracted out was sort of a Rosetta stone from which i kinda adopted the same structure and just pushed forward.

DID YOU KNOW YOU COULD HOLD CONTROL AND SHIFT + V in the code editor thing and it will give you the past 10+ entries of copy pasting you've done!? This is going to change my damned life! Not to mention I'm now organizing everything and using #region so i could hide away code I rarely touch. How much work have I squandered and for how long!? I'm trying to focus on the improved workflow for the future rather than harp on what an idiot I've been working in isolation.

Holy shit. Bookmarks, quick search buttons, quick collapsing and rolling out, not to mention just a throng of practices and methods that coders employ that I just had no idea existed. It was kind of overwhelming, and for a bit it hit me pretty hard. Should I even be doing this? I have no idea WTF I'm doing, and i'm kinda just throwing things around in a messy manner unaware of best practices. It's usually late at night when i'm sleep deprived when i get most down in the dumps about the project after I expelled all my creative energy on it thinking of all the things that could have been if I learned this code stuff earlier in my life, but then I think about the other crap I ended up picking up randomly, and I think this game ended up being a unique thing because of all the randomness of it all. Could be worse, no point harping on this shit.

So I'm finding it hard to get work done today towards the milestone of a playable vertical slice because I'm just organizing the ever living shit out of this terrible code base. I may not be good at code, but i'm a hell of a lot better today than I was a couple years ago when I was just poking at it hoping the things I changed didn't just make the entire thing explode. There's this thing called a "debugger" that I hear is kinda important, I have no idea how to use teh damned thing. And between navigating a shit code base and having to maintain this unkempt mess, I feel as though in a way I have done a sort of "Wax on, wax off" method of coding, where I've learned to just deal with a massive throng of shit, and have to create systems in absolutely terrible conditions, and I think that hardens you as a developer. It gives you an appreciation, and every time you tackle a pain in the ass issue, you level up. You don't level up fighting easy mobs, you level up fighting the pain in the ass ones when there is no safety net. Coders will understand this, but we only have so much RAM in our brains and every time we're working on a complex task, we kinda have to poke around the code base to figure out where things are and what systems and structures are making a system work on not work. The only way to get good at this is to take on complex things, have the break and figure out how to fix them. If you work too often in a super clean environment, or maintain standards that are too high, you end up overinvesting into infrastructure and you never figure out how to get shit done quick and dirty so you can see if it's fun or not.

So over the years i've been doing code the really fucking stupid way, but I like to think there are a few tiny benefits to that. I now look at my project and I see TONS of cleaning to do, but i'm excited  for that because that means future development will be faster and less error prone. Rather than having some random chunk of code thrown into my update loop assigning the proper health of a creature, i can just put that where the variable is declared, among a billion other things.

You don't know what you don't know, and I just found out I'm an absolute dumbass when it comes to code. I'm probably doing all kinds of things at a low, stupid level, but it works, and the game is becoming fun, and that's what matters IMO. I kinda like the idea that i've got everything coming online and it's relatively simple. The project is agile, coders of all levels could come on board take in all kinds of directions without any headache.

When I see studios like project red or blizzard releasing super buggy games, and I'm sitting her with my finger paints and my game tends to work without issue on many platforms (thanks Unity) I don't really feel as though I'm missing out THAT much on all those high end coding standards. And while we're on the subject, the intellectual dick measuring contest that coders routinely do is one of the things that's always bugged me about game dev. Perfect code standards doesn't make you better at making a game fun, being obsessive about learning this coding artform does not necessarily make you a better maker of games. It's like being a grammar Nazi doesn't make you a fantastic writer. I don't want to undermine absolutely genius level code running on cutting edge math and architecture that magically interacts with top end hardware to do incredible things. Code is an artform, when executed at the highest level it's fucking incredible. I'm just sayin' that there's a lot of neckbeards out there that get off on inflating their value because they know a few party tricks with 0's and 1's and it pollutes a lot of teams and companies, because it's easy to fake it till you make it in this industry of cowards, liars, and back scratchers.

Ok that ramble went way longer than I planned. Less blathering for the next few days and more dev.

Going from this nightmare:

To this:

I'm sure it could be better, using whatever common knowledge coders have about sorting and shit that they've learned over decades being surrounded by others who are laser proficient at their task, but for the purposes of SeaCrit this is lightyears beyond what I was doing yesterday, so whatever.