Games
This is a bit of a bonus section as it's something I don't really do or have any participation in anymore, but was a solid interest and hobby for a period of time.
Around the late 2010's timeframe I had picked up programming as a hobby. I was heavily into roguelikes at this time and simple game creation was something I was interested in. It's hard to pinpoint what sparked my interest in learning a programming language but in any case, I had picked up Python and was teaching myself the basics via youtube videos and reading online.
My dream of creating my own game was never really realized, but some attempts did form and were somewhat functional. My first ever game was a zork text-adventure clone that had a working lighting system. The player could "see" only so far ahead of them depending on if they had a light source, and the light source played a role in if the player found loot or not when they opened a container, like a cabinet or cupboard.
A copy of this game was never saved and I deleted it like a fool at some point, but an attempt at a game I do still have a copy of is one called Behind Enemy Lines.
This was a game built in Python with the curses library to display a primitive text-based interface. It was basically meant to be a copy of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, but focusing purely on the jungle-survival aspect of it.
The player could move around in basically an imaginary top-down grid in the 4 cardinal directions by typing said direction into the box in the lower-left. The game would randomly generate a selection of plants in any particular zone each time the player moved. Every plant had a defined leaf shape and color, and you would want to keep this in mind when selecting what camo pattern you wanted to wear. For example:
- Tropical broadleaf enviornment that's mostly green -> Olive Brushstroke
- Tropical tannish enviornment with lots of prickly plants -> Green Tigerstripe
It sounds complex and feature-full, but I never really got much done past this in the game. The code was also piling up, and I never got a grasp on how to handle a large project with many hundreds or even thousands of lines of code in different files.
Misc Projects
Games were never something I was good at and I never produced a fully functioning game that you could sit and play. However, there were a few projects that were a bit more successful and that I was somewhat proud of making.
One of my older projects was a terminal celestial-object tracker that was meant to be easily programmable by the user. You would have a selection of objects that you could record their position in the night sky using right-ascention and declination coordinates, which are frequently used in amateur astronomy.
This was another curses-based program written in Python. You could simply type in the name of any object on the screen and it would spit out that object's last recorded coordinates. This could be used over time to plot out a path of travel across the night sky of a particular object, and could eventually be used to predict where an object is currently in the night sky, and where it would be in the future, given enough data has been collected for a prediction. These functions were never completed in the program, however.
Ultimately, I never got far in programming and stopped in around late 2020 due to being burnt out from it. I doubt I'll return to making programs as I lack the drive and understanding to create anything more complex than text in a terminal, but it was a fun time and was a good time killer.