Introducing Back in a minute blog!

Last year, having finished my CD-to-FLAC automation script called FLACRIPPER, I jumped head first into my next project: Create a fun game that is completely written in BASH. I started out with these ideas:

• It must be quick
• …but also vast, if you want it to be
• It must be a full world (have a navigational map)
• It must have monsters you can fight
• It must be random

This was the start of forest.sh which later became Back in a minute.

I started coding while reading a lot of political philosophy, simply because I needed a break from books. Creating something that’s in your head on paper is pretty much my everyday life, but there is usually little feedback except when you receive a grade on a paper. Which is pretty arbitrary and not very constructive.

Coding, on the other hand, provides instant feedback! In addition, it does train the same ontological skills that I need in philosophy, so it isn’t a complete waste of time. One big difference is that an article can have spelling mistakes without affecting the content, whereas code simply breaks down in a pile of error messages..

Having coded on and off for half a year, I understood that while being a favourite pastime I couldn’t force my readers (what readers?) to read about it, so I played with the idea of creating a separate blog for the project. When I came to the point of having a working game, I was pretty much planning a sequel. This prompted me to create a separate blog:

I present to you the official Back in a minute homepage!

Please note, there is currently no code in the repositories, because there are 2 bugs I want to iron out first so the game is 100% playable from day one. Last night I watched a Kickstarter update from Tim Schafer‘s development of Broken Age, of which Act 1 was released to backers just yesterday. Anyway, he said that as a game developer at the end of creating a game, there are a hundred things you’d like to do; but there are only 10 things you _can do_, and those are the things you _have to do_.

Without any comparison to the inspiring genius of Tim Schafer, who gave us Monkey Island and Grim Fandango among others, it gave me a push in the right direction. ‘Cause I’ve been struggling with a «social media» feature of my game, which posts a row from the highscore list on Twitter etc. But it has created more problems than it solves, and yesterday I realized that it has nothing to do with the game. So I’m re-doing it in a more basic manner, by simply creating a copy-pastable message in the terminal using echo the player can post him or herself.

That leaves 2 (known) bugs for me to fix, commenting the code a bit more verbosely, and making it more readable (casing). I began writing it in gedit, which is okay for smaller projects, but as soon as I got more than 1500 lines of code it became too slow. I am now using geany, and considering learning emacs instead. That’s what Jesus would do. Anyway, you can follow the development on Back in a minute blog, which was created so those who don’t care don’t have to be bothered! :D