Re: I'm blind and want to develop a very complex game
You know what's weird?
I started out here: Lissa Explains it all. Yes, it's mostly focused on HTML (and pre Web2.0, at that), or at least it was the last time I was there... ur... years and years ago. The tiny, near useless _javascript_ examples were a minor but welcome introduction to basic scripting.
I then started looking for more complex examples, and (again being way before stack overflow) my main resource became The _javascript_ Source. At the time, the only real game they had was Falcon Fighter, a dreadfully complex beast of a script that I couldn't even test because it's entirely image-based. I then started taking Java classes (and Falcon Fighter remained pretty impenetrable for about a year because it was still the most advanced thing I'd ever seen. The solution was to write something more complicated.)
Looking at the backup of my Jumpdrive from those fi
rst classes, I have 5 programs, one of which I wrote to try and fix the image map on my website (It didn't work so well). The others are:
Diamond: it takes a number from the user, then prints a user-specified symbol on the screen several times, so as to form the shape of a diamond. This is a more advanced version of doing the same thing with a square (which is mostly just a test to see if you understand loops).
FileIODemo: Exactly what it says: reads from one file, writes to another. I've been keeping this around as a reference because I really don't like checking the Javadocs. BGT could really use a section on this in the tutorials, so that people get the idea in their heads for saving/loading game data.
TTT: Tic-Tac-Toe. I'm trying and failing to remember what, if any, array-based assignments came before this.
Wordcount: Read from a file, return the number of words therein. A bit of warning: it works best with plaintext (.txt). Even somethin
g as simple as RTF adds formatting information. Don't even get me started on docX. Anyway, the point of this assignment is an introduction to manipulating strings, which is terribly useful.
Earlier assignments for which I do not have backups are Hello World (literally every introductory programming tutorial ever should have one of these somewhere near the beginning), Mile-per-gallon (take numbers from the user and do arithmetic with them), and the afore-mentioned StarBox (take a number and draw a square made of asterisks, user-number wide and high).
I'll also note that these assignments and the two websites and a little bit of talking to teachers was enough to make my terrible ancient games, but it rather helps that I had been trying various other unintuitive means of making games before that, including PowerPoint. (I had a complete-ish PowerPoint game on my website for a short while, but I took it down because it w as huge and I realized that getting it to work that way would be difficult forever. By "huge" I mean ~70MB. This was way before Swamp.). I say it helps, because I was actively looking for tricks to get games out of whatever resource I could. In my second semester of programming classes, I wound up trying to talk someone a semester behind me through how the little he'd already learned could be used to make text games (variables, loops, ifs, text input and text output).
(For the curious: PowerPoint has loads of nonlinear interaction options. I did most of my work with it on Jaws 3.7; as of Jaws 4, the virtual viewer kinda broke most of what I was using, so I actively scorned upgrading Jaws until I got good enough at programming to make a more intuitive interface. Hidden slides, slide numbers, on-slide links, mouse over/mouse click effects... custom shows are an option, too, but the one time I tried using them turned into a huge mess, which is kinda upsetting, sinc e that case was clearly better than the others. ... That case was the last PPT game I made, because the game I had in mind felt appropriate as a point-and-click. Oh, and Jaws reported object position/overlap, and a little trig and getting someone to clerify ambiguous autoshapes meant I could make simple graphics with PowerPoint. Simple!=good. I tried making Ninja Sprites. I might be able to make screen shots if one of our sighted users wants to confirm how awful they are.)
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