It has been quite a while and the jam is finally over, so it’s time to reflect and learn from my mistakes.

Everyone makes mistakes so it’s fine, but what sometimes isn’t fine is doing the same mistake repeatedly and not learning from it.

So, what happened?

The story

I wanted to learn Godot, found VitaVehicle which is an open source game and i decided to learn how it works. The code i was met by was quite wild by what i would expect, so i decided to clean it up. About 12 days passed and i saw a jam opportunity perfectly aligned with what i was doing: a jam that allows you to continue working on a random project instead of making a new one!

This jam became a success and no wonder that happened. People want to make their old projects better and this was the push some of us needed! So, i joined the jam and in the first or second day i immediately knew that this was overwhelming for me. Trying to modify an unfamiliar large project for a jam is not easy. The game was the second biggest project i have ever worked with, but in a new engine, and after two years of very sparse development. In other words i’m rusty.

So, i start cleaning up the code, i make changes, but immediately i get a distraction. A second project which is used to help ease the development of projects and it just has code that is reusable, such that i have to type it once and never again. Here’s that project: https://github.com/tomsterbg/short

Then i got another distraction, revisiting my “old” music player download program. Ironically, i made that specifically because i wanted to not get distracted while studying or trying to code. To focus better while developing, which was actually very fun and useful for me. Still, it’s a project that takes its own time.

VitaVehicle progress

It’s all on Github, but i have added some graphical options and a drift car because i really wanted to drift.

Some of the code cleanup managed to reduce the size of the game, some increased it, some made code more optimized and readable, some was with the opposite effect.

However, most of the progress is invisible to the end user, stuff like code, readability, structure.

Distractions

I simply have too many interests. Whether that’d be politics, physics, math, music, psychology, whatever. On top of that i entered uni, but thankfully it’s actually really fun there!

For now what i’ll do is focus on uni because we study physics, math, engineering, programming and all this is important to give me a wider understanding of what’s going on. Recently i figured out that Python has these cool dunder methods that are like Luau metamethods. Sadly no dunder methods for Godot.

I also got a colleague who i’m teaching the things i have known already, and this really helps me solidify my own base of understanding. Like a revision of everything. This also helped me realize that, i am not good at teaching psychological stuff, but i am pretty good at explaining logic. Or maybe she’s just really smart. She understood bitwise operators in the first day of ever learning programming which was very surprising!

On a side note, very importantly, you CANNOT make any complex thing work if your own health is not healthy. I learned this the hard way. Exercise for better health and programming, engineering or whatever is so important, that i’d say it’s like having the keys for a car. Can’t drive without them.