Gone! For but a Moment!
Introduction
What’s this? An update by none other than the Hand of Froge? Well, yes, given how I’ve been the sole author of every single piece of commentary and bullshittery that has ever crossed the good graces of this monochromatic enterprise, and even those I have solicited to be a part of this gravy train have sent me messages saying that I’m only claiming to be a writer on the side so that I don’t have to tell anybody that I’m actually unemployed. Guys, being a whore is not “unemployed”. It’s called the grey market. Look it up.
I guess I’m not too good of a writer if I have to resort to self – depreciation every single post, even if they’ve been weeks apart and at this point my dying userbase would be happy if I started posting my abstract poems about girls who dumped me in high school half a decade ago and how I still haven’t gotten over it despite being old enough to be their dads, so long as they were newborns in high school and nobody questioned what a scrubby little sack of flesh in a nappy is doing in Auto Mechanics 12. I suppose the teacher was afraid he was living in a bad fanfiction and decided to let the school board deal with the localised increase in infant mortality rather than question his sense of reality.
Now, I have a firm grip on reality, or at least the voices tell me so. But I also feel that I’ve been losing touch with it, which is the sort of sophisticated literary duopoly that’s worthy of being immortalised in the greatest of fanfiction, such as “Garfield Effect: Galaxy Adventure”, which is pushing 32,000 words and is written by the same bloke who brought you “High School Garfield”, “Garfield: First Blood”, and the all – time classics: “Garfield: Royal Rescue” and “Garfield: Prince of Tragedy: Royal Rescue Part 2”. You know what? I’m just gonna say it. ShakespeareHemmingway is kicking my ass and making me grateful for it.
The point of this screed isn’t to project my desires to become the world’s greatest Garfield historical fiction writer. It’s to state, in terms that are sudden by necessity, that I must once again take a break from Kratzen this month in order to focus on some goals that have nothing to do with it, though by the end of them all, I believe will make me a better person, and more learned in the silly little mediums of games and art.
I have decided to get back into the games development scene, and learn once again what it means to be a developer. I have gotten lazy over the months. I have done nothing with programming, nothing with design, and little to do with games beyond writing some ideas down on this blog before you. I know no languages, and though I know about them, I am illiterate. I also know no engines, I have not been invited to create any games from my associates, and I have no claim to my name that would allow me to say that I have done any work with video games that allow me to be an authority on them. I have been an observer in this sense, insightful as I have been despite my passivity, but solely an observer nonetheless.
No more. I have decided on what my point of entry will be: Godot 3.0, and then 3.0.1, and perhaps 3.0.2 assuming the development team doesn’t kill themselves from the 2,900 open GitHub issues. I have dabbled in it a bit. I’ve done some of the tutorials and I’m familiar with the architecture and design philosophy, which is similar to GameMaker: Studio in its graphical simplicity but does not suffer the curse of proprietary shitware. But when it comes to its programming language, I am stumped. I’m so out of sorts that I had a hard time remembering what a “function” was, and with this sentence my credibility circles the drain into an unceremonious burial in the sewers.
Well, ignorance begets education, and if I must learn to program to be a games developer (shocking, I know), then it’s time to put on my big boy pants and hit the books. The short period of time I worked with Python a few months ago I found it to be a much more pleasant language than any of the others I’ve tried. C is obtuse, C++ is obtuse++, and JavaScript is JavaScript. I’ve briefly considered self – harm, and by that I mean Java, though I’m worried that a "Hello World" that takes five lines would make a harmless bit of bloodletting into a harmful bit of anemia.
But Python? Barring the snobbery of those particular types of wanna – be programmers who believe that a dynamically typed, strictly – formatted language with a focus on readability and intuitive design is not one of the greatest innovations of programming to come out of the 20th century, but is instead something for the little baby coders who aren’t serious on being real programmers, who spend their days looking at stack traces and manually managing memory while wondering why they can never get as much work done as their co – workers who use whatever works for them instead of appealing to undefined standards of what a real language is… it’s good. It works. It scales from your basement FizzBuzz up to YouTube Itself, and all of this under the baby syntax that’s clearly for babies guys we swear.
I’ll be able to make even more snarky comments once I am able to learn it fully, as much as one can claim to “learn” a programming language, or indeed any language at all. Even though I can whip up website designs on – the – fly, the entire time I’m crutching W3Schools, the Mozilla Developer Network, and Stack Exchange to figure out whether whatever I’m doing is sane, and if it isn’t sane (because CSS is mad, mad, mad), if I can implement it in a way that’s more – or – less valid HTML — and all this time I’m copying wholesale elements of my previous websites to maintain The Brand, as it were. This has been my experience with every markup and programming language. I doubt it gets better.
But I will struggle regardless, and I will learn what it takes in order to take my bountiful garden of games concepts and make them a reality. For the learning I will remain silent, as this is my struggle alone. For the development I will create a developer blog, so that I can look back on what I’ve done and offer an authoritative ledger at my aims and ideas during the process of creation. What I will develop I already have in mind, but it wouldn’t be fair for an established competitor to jump the gun on my brilliant ideas, now would it? You’ll find out once it’s done. Or dead. Either way works.
Folks, I could talk more. But I’m already sick of talking about what I plan to do in favour of the action I will do. So I banish myself from this blog, I banish you from reading it, and I banish everyone from anticipating what I will create next! Of course if you want to check in on March 31 and see what I’ll make for Ten Months with Kratzen, then go right ahead. Oh, and the Kratzen Anniversary is on 2018 – 04 – 01. A whole year with this site! And to think I’ve barely fulfilled its stated purpose!
If you need your daily Froge Fix, allow me to offer you the fruits of Degenerates and take a look at all that I’ve done in the past. Some good articles include “The Industrial Steamworks”, the Bojack Horseman review series, “Review of Game Reviewers”, and “The Spongebob Squarepants: The Movie: The Game: The Review”. I’d like to explain what I like about them, however I have not read them in several months and I prefer to treat them like my disappointing children who live far away from me and have mutually decided to never call each other.
And for those of you who want to bug me, there’s always my e – mail address. No, I’m not posting it here. Find it for yourself, scavenger.
Alright, now skedaddle. Scoot! Heck off!