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Comment by indigoabstract | Hacker News Reader

I've become wary of commenting on articles that mention the pros and cons of various languages, but I still find it strange that so many people are so strongly focused on what their favourite language can do (usually better than others), instead of the project they're working on. When it should be the other way around.

The joke he mentioned about having 50 engines written but only 5 games certainly rings true and I don't think the language is the main problem preventing people from getting their projects done..

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The hardest part of a project is finishing it. I think the main issue is the fun problems to solve happen very early in the project and once those are done it becomes incredibly tedius and boring and I usually lose focus until the project dies. Its difficult to maintain motivation.

Right. If someone could come up with a pill or something to maintain motivation and make all the bugs and hairy annoying details feel fresh again, just like the feeling of starting over, I would certainly part with my money. But there's no such thing unfortunately.

Adderall?

I'm only half-joking :)

Interesting, I almost find it the opposite right now. Learning the engine is a pain in the ass -- it's not particularly hard, just tedious to learn all the APIs and quirks -- and then when you're initially building the thing, "it's not fun yet" for a quite a while. But then once you have the fundamentals down, you can add more abilities and characters and other features, that's the fun shit.

I was working on the AI last night, and since I already had one functioning AI agent, it was pretty easy to spin up variations that behaved in moderately different ways, which was very fun!

I've only been dabbling though, and still sort of in the prototype stage, not quite a full game yet but getting there. Maybe I'll feel more like you suggest deeper into development.

I think the period between having a playable alpha and a polished release is the part people hate.

Or just grinding out content to make the game longer.

I hope you enjoy the process and succeed as a game dev.

Thanks!

Right now, the idea of creating new content being "grinding" baffles me, but that's as a hobbyist developer of course. I'm sure I'd feel different if I was in a big company doing it.

IMO one language can sidetrack you more than another. It might not be the main problem but a language that gets in the way for your usecase causes you to focus on the wrong problem. Making a good game is really hard and really needs you to focus outside the tech.

Totally agree

My unpopular programming opinion: languages aren't that interesting to me

I'm much more interested in the problem being solved and algorithms in the abstract sense

Yep.

Bikeshedding, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and https://xkcd.com/927/ are some ways of loosely describing what you said.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_on...

>but I still find it strange that so many people are so strongly focused on what their favourite language can do (usually better than others), instead of the project they're working on.

Yes, if they are so convinced of that, why are they not back in the office or at home, working busy as a beaver on their project, using that great programming language, the benefits of which they extol?

Smells fishy to me.

Oops.

Do people see what I did there? ;)

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