Should I do tutorials?
Monday, September 29th, 2008 | News
This week’s game is for all the retro-heads out there. This is one that I’m super excited for. Maybe I’ll make a YouTube video for it like I did for Alleytris.
Being a couple of weeks ahead now I’m trying to get the book together. It feels like there’s a deficit between what I want to do and the unrelenting march of time, so I’m going to make available what I have so far and ask for your feedback on it. I want to, like everything else, make it as good as possible and as usual I need you for that. On an excellent reader suggestion the next release will change program listings to Monaco font which has crossed zeros, but that means I’m reformatting every page.
There are certain magnets that I feel pulling my efforts in different directions. If I could leverage this into a full time job I’d happily explore them all, but being as my time is limited I have to pick and choose the attraction forces that I entertain. For instance: at the moment Cymon’s Games is C/C++, but python’s siren wail has called to me for long enough and I am soon relenting to her sweet syntactical song.
There is another lodestone I appear to have been grasped by. After one more comment (thank you so much for that), finding some really good YouTube videos, as well as a personal focus on the edutainment aspect of Cymon’s Games, I appear to be orbiting the planet “Tutorial,” a course heading I have heretofore avoided. I’ve even tried to excuse my evasion by vague hand waving. But now I feel like I’d really like to make the sort of thing that could be used by a secondary school teacher to give them a 10 minute break, complete with homework assignments. Unfortunately it’s the sort of thing I’d like to do (1) regularly and (2) as professionally as I can. Number 2 I can do, but number 1 is going to be tricky. Maybe in the end this will have to be put on the shelf for the future, but I am defiantly orbiting the idea.
So what do you think? Post a comment, sound off, and convince me that I really need to do regular tutorials to keep your patronage or that I should relax because if I die updates stop all together.
3 Comments to Should I do tutorials?
I’m not so sure about this site getting into the tutorial business. I think it’s hit a sweet spot just as it is, with the focus on type-ins and traditional, simplistic games. It’s a niche I haven’t seen filled anywhere else. If there are other sites like this one, I’d like to see them.
Me too. Why do you think I made this site?
September 30, 2008
On the flipside, one cool thing this site could do is take a single vintage game, and over many iterations, slowly upgrade it from basic, to c, to c w/curses, to graphical, to commercial quality, although the latter may depend on art and sound files, which I know you’re generally trying to avoid. This would be more like a case study than a tutorial per se. This is something you don’t find on the typical tutorial sites.
October 1, 2008
There are games which I want to do enhanced version of using PDCurses or, where appropriate, allegro. AND there are games that I’d like to do with full graphics and sound that, while maybe not appropriate for this site may have a home elsewhere.
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September 29, 2008