by Garth's Equipment Shop » Tue Mar 11, 2014 3:29 pm
Well considering the difficulty in learning and becoming proficient at pretty much any Interactive Fiction programming language (I'm mostly familiar with Tads 2, Tads HTML and Tads 3 but have dabbled in others) the fact that you were able to actually gain proficiency in just a month is pretty impressive. Based on that and how quickly I learned to make a game in ACK (pretty much just a few hours of tinkering is all it took really - the rest is only limited by how much creativity and polishing you put into it) I am guessing you probably already know all you need to know about ACK just from all these years you've spent reading our posts in the ACK sub-forum. ;)
I am of course hopeful that the contest will become a tradition among ACK users and possibly inspire greater efforts in the future as we gain practice working within a limited time frame, ideally leading to better design practices aimed towards focus, organization/planning and efficiency allowing us to complete projects in a timely fashion without sacrificing too much in the way of creativity and refinement.
But I am not expecting that on the first run by any means. I'm sure Chris could probably whip up an extremely creative and polished mini-game in a week but he is the creator of ACK.
For this first run, as I said in the intro, I'm not expecting anything spectacular. I just want to see our little gang get motivated to do something as a community, give us all a really easy goal we can all accomplish to get a taste of that feeling of accomplishment of actually completing something (even if it is a turd), and also begin actually generating games (no matter how small and humble at first) featuring a variety of themes to chose from that we can list along with Chris's games when people come asking what we have to offer so far.
It is flat out embarrassing to read all the posts over the years asking where all the games people have made in ACK are and basically all I can mention are those made by the creator of ACK in spite of the many many WIP threads we've all started. Problem is, like you Tdarcos, all us ACK designers have been so obsessed with perfection that we keep taking on projects that really require more time and dedication than we have to give due to things like jobs, children and/or other things we are committed to such as playing in a band, hunting/fishing/hiking, martial arts, archery, LARPing, or whatever we do on our free time.
So really the best thing to do is to put those big dreams on hold and focus on just getting used to accomplishing a lot less but at least accomplishing something. I think we all need that. We need that over and over again until finishing projects becomes simply what we do. So then when we do finally turn back to that big dream vision we kept burning ourselves out on we will hopefully be more focused, more motivated, more organized, more efficient, have a better plan of attack, all from the experience and confidence gained from completing many smaller projects.
Perhaps sharing the processes each of us used to complete small projects which each of us worked on (like a class project) and seeing which process worked best we can learn from each other and develop game design guidelines or strategies best suited to the ACK environment, thus better preparing us to tackle those bigger projects we've been wanting to do.
Well considering the difficulty in learning and becoming proficient at pretty much any Interactive Fiction programming language (I'm mostly familiar with Tads 2, Tads HTML and Tads 3 but have dabbled in others) the fact that you were able to actually gain proficiency in just a month is pretty impressive. Based on that and how quickly I learned to make a game in ACK (pretty much just a few hours of tinkering is all it took really - the rest is only limited by how much creativity and polishing you put into it) I am guessing you probably already know all you need to know about ACK just from all these years you've spent reading our posts in the ACK sub-forum. ;)
I am of course hopeful that the contest will become a tradition among ACK users and possibly inspire greater efforts in the future as we gain practice working within a limited time frame, ideally leading to better design practices aimed towards focus, organization/planning and efficiency allowing us to complete projects in a timely fashion without sacrificing too much in the way of creativity and refinement.
But I am not expecting that on the first run by any means. I'm sure Chris could probably whip up an extremely creative and polished mini-game in a week but he is the creator of ACK.
For this first run, as I said in the intro, I'm not expecting anything spectacular. I just want to see our little gang get motivated to do something as a community, give us all a really easy goal we can all accomplish to get a taste of that feeling of accomplishment of actually completing something (even if it is a turd), and also begin actually generating games (no matter how small and humble at first) featuring a variety of themes to chose from that we can list along with Chris's games when people come asking what we have to offer so far.
It is flat out embarrassing to read all the posts over the years asking where all the games people have made in ACK are and basically all I can mention are those made by the creator of ACK in spite of the many many WIP threads we've all started. Problem is, like you Tdarcos, all us ACK designers have been so obsessed with perfection that we keep taking on projects that really require more time and dedication than we have to give due to things like jobs, children and/or other things we are committed to such as playing in a band, hunting/fishing/hiking, martial arts, archery, LARPing, or whatever we do on our free time.
So really the best thing to do is to put those big dreams on hold and focus on just getting used to accomplishing a lot less but at least accomplishing something. I think we all need that. We need that over and over again until finishing projects becomes simply what we do. So then when we do finally turn back to that big dream vision we kept burning ourselves out on we will hopefully be more focused, more motivated, more organized, more efficient, have a better plan of attack, all from the experience and confidence gained from completing many smaller projects.
Perhaps sharing the processes each of us used to complete small projects which each of us worked on (like a class project) and seeing which process worked best we can learn from each other and develop game design guidelines or strategies best suited to the ACK environment, thus better preparing us to tackle those bigger projects we've been wanting to do.