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i wanna have fun programming again (programming.dev)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by pugsnroses77@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

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after a grueling 4 years of school and a bit of time at a fintech company ive lost almost all the enjoyment i once had for computers in high school. what kind of projects or whatever can i do to have fun again without feeling stressed.

edit: thanks everyone for such creative suggestions!! anything else on the internets just like build a trivia game teehee but yall put real thought into this shit, thank you!!

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 15 points 10 months ago

Userscripts are tiny and make the web better for you and others. Downside: Javascript. It's not awful, but hoo boy, it is not great.

Itch.io game jams are nice little doses of panic for creative output. I tend to go for low-end systems because on some level I'm still offended there weren't more pseudo-3D games on 8- and 16-bit hardware. Downside: if you're not using bare-metal C, it's because you're using assembly.

I recommend the Game Boy family. GB/C has a lovely compiler in GBDK and the hardware is hilariously forgiving. GBA supports C++, somehow, and is basically a modern ARM device with the worst specs imaginable. But it'll do any 2D bullshit you can imagine, no sweat, and there's bitmap modes if you insist on 3D the hard way.

DOS is also weirdly flexible, and Open Watcom will cross-compile from everywhere. Try to make anything good-looking on MDA / Hercules cards and a 4.77 MHz 8088. Do some voxel heightmaps on 386 and CGA. Thumb your nose at Windows 95 and do fancy lighting in software VGA. Some maniac out there is gonna run it on real hardware.

I have three broadly-applicable and closely-related mantras from game jams:

Always be shipping. Achieve minimum viable product as soon as possible, so all future work is tweaking. Tweaking is easy. Tweaking can go until the last minute, and is easy to shrug off if it doesn't work. Implementing a pause function will humble you if you put it off.
Different ideas go in the next project. You want this overhead title to be third-person? Well, cut that shit out, and make a note for next time. Don't Daikatana yourself.
Failure is an option. It is perfectly okay to pull the chute and admit things won't come together in the next, oh, twelve hours. It's just a game. You're just doing it for yourself. And if you give a shit beyond whatever contest you wanted to submit for, you can just keep working on it, later.

None of this is stress-free. But it's the kind you control, with more reward than punishment. And it's not a high-stakes zero-sum game about who can take the most adderall.