On the Subject of Motivation

I like programming. You might have gotten that by now, but I've said it again just in case.

For instance, for the last few days, I've been trying to make a program that will take a .json file and turn it, essentially, into a text adventure. It all started off fine. I found a way to define rooms, exits, names and descriptions. You could move between rooms, and it was good. Then, I thought, it would be a good idea to add items. You'd be able to pick them up and drop them, and you could carry them in your inventory between rooms.

From here, the next logical step is to allow custom actions for items. For instance, you'd be able to read a newspaper, rather than just examining it, and you could eat a cookie.

This is where it broke.

You, the game creator, were able to say something in response to an action, and could put an item in the inventory. However, I wanted the ability to remove an item, either from the room or the inventory. This would have been brilliant, if it had worked. I ended up running into trouble with the item dictionary changing length and spent the best part of an afternoon staring at the code (most of which I couldn't understand any more) and hoping that it would start working of its own accord. Needless to say that, if the world worked like this, it would be much easier in all walks of life.

This is the point where I began to give up, as much as it annoys me to type it. I was making this in my free time, and debugging isn't quite my idea of fun. Long story short, I lost motivation. As much as I wanted to make this program, the combination of not understanding my own code (which is never fun) and not being able to make things work correctly (which happens more often than not, I can normally fix it, though) led to me losing the will to continue with it.

Until next time,
o/