The proper motivation
Mar. 10th, 2006 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eclectic_boyIt's been years since I wrote any code, beyond a few three-minute microprograms when I needed to calculate something that had a straightforward algorithm. So the fact that I just spent the better part of two hours working on a program about a hundred lines long is enough to convince me against my earlier opinion that, yeah, I guess I really do like Button Men. About a month ago ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dwvanstone introduced me to this free online version of a Cheapass Collectible-I'm-not-making-this-up-Button Game. In its physical version, you buy a literal button to wear while playing which has printed on it the dice that you're allowed to use---a particular handful of polyhedral dice. You play against someone with their own handful, capturing each other's dice either by having one die beat another or having several add up to another exactly.
The online version's much more detailed, since you can have a lot of interacting special powers that would be difficult to duplicate (or keep track of) in the real world, and I've been playing games with DVS andirilyth ever since, and while I find the long wait between turns-lasting-only-seconds to be a drawback, I have to admit that the game itself is fun and, apparently, addictive. I decided a couple of hours ago to see if I could write a version to play against, even if the program only used a bonehead simple strategy. I haven't actually made it to the computer-opponent part, but I have a working, if graceless, two player game that allows you to fight with the two basic kinds of attacks, Power and Skill attacks. Mostly I'm just glad to accomplish a little something, and show that I can still write programs with few enough bugs that debugging is a small percentage of the time spent on the project. Yeah, it's only a hundred lines, and it's in (Chipmunk)BASIC, so that's zero street cred, but it made me happy.
dwvanstone introduced me to this free online version of a Cheapass Collectible-I'm-not-making-this-up-Button Game. In its physical version, you buy a literal button to wear while playing which has printed on it the dice that you're allowed to use---a particular handful of polyhedral dice. You play against someone with their own handful, capturing each other's dice either by having one die beat another or having several add up to another exactly.The online version's much more detailed, since you can have a lot of interacting special powers that would be difficult to duplicate (or keep track of) in the real world, and I've been playing games with DVS and
irilyth ever since, and while I find the long wait between turns-lasting-only-seconds to be a drawback, I have to admit that the game itself is fun and, apparently, addictive. I decided a couple of hours ago to see if I could write a version to play against, even if the program only used a bonehead simple strategy. I haven't actually made it to the computer-opponent part, but I have a working, if graceless, two player game that allows you to fight with the two basic kinds of attacks, Power and Skill attacks. Mostly I'm just glad to accomplish a little something, and show that I can still write programs with few enough bugs that debugging is a small percentage of the time spent on the project. Yeah, it's only a hundred lines, and it's in (Chipmunk)BASIC, so that's zero street cred, but it made me happy.
