KibaBase

They say that behind every successful game developer is a string of failures. Or at least what I imagined a game development guru’s take on it. Well, don’t blindly listen to him, because he’s just a exceptional dude with 10+ games and thousands of roaring fans.

You and I don’t know what make him tick, so we just have to test his advices. Then we have to hope it ticks in us or figure out how to make it ticks for us.

A guru once said that if you don’t try, you never fail in life. I supposed this is true, but isn’t it just suspiciously empty words? I mean, how many motivational speakers you can possibly get that will really improve the “synergy” or inspire teams to “innovative”, not just “think” about it. How many personal development gurus like to tell you must fail it before you succeed?

Isn’t part of life learning about what is achievable and non-achievable for you and then finding your own very important niche in the world? How many failures can you have before admitting that entering the baseball league is a zero sum game? Never mind the fact that only a chosen few can enter. I supposed something like entrepreneurs are very much more doable than becoming a professional athlete.  Your peers will approve of you like a rock star as a bonus.

Well, maybe personal development gurus are just overpaid philosophers?

Well, I got some tricks that I pulled in my three years of game development experiences that work really well for me. But nah, I am not going to tell you stories of how I achieve these nirvana movement, but I am going to tell you failures stories. Well, maybe they’re not failures, and they’re actually pretty valuable learning experience. Well, let just face it, it is failures all the same isn’t it?

It is all tragedies, and it will make you cry!

Maybe telling you these stories will give you insight on how to improve your situation. I don’t know, but I hope it will be pretty interesting. If you’re entertained than that’s my success right there. If it is a failure, than just maybe I’ll do better the next time? Who know?

So yeah, let start this prolouge.

I believe it was a once upon a blue moon, when I howled at the top of the cliffs for hours like any good wolf does. Granted, I was a just a loser wolf. I couldn’t hunt anything for my family and I relies on the alpha male and alpha females to provide everything for me. At least I can howl.  So I didn’t have any real special skills, well beside drawing a cute girl or two? So on that day, I decided to learn programming to prove my wolfy pride!

Well, in actuality, I was searching for a python book in the public library. You see, I really wanted to learn programming for a long time but I just couldn’t get into it for some odd reason. However, much to my dismay, I couldn’t find a python book. They all been checked out of the library. However, a small book was shining that day. It was called  “Learn to Program” and it was brand new. I believe its author was Chris Pine and publisher was Pragramatic Programmer. So I guess I have to thank Chris for making this hobby and my passion possible. Anyway, on that fateful day, like any egear curious kid, I checked it out, I believed among the many myriad books that I never brother to read.

But this book was a real gem! The tutorial were suited for beginner and are very easy to grasp and is very short, unlike the god damn information overloaded “beginner” books that got like a thousand page of..well…too much cruft. Granted, I didn’t get all the way through the book but by that time, I pretty much grasped the basic.

Eventually, I checked out the site of this book later and learned just how through this guy is. No wonder why it was so easy to understand! This guy, over the course of two years have people explain to him what they don’t understand and he’ll fix it so people will stop pestering him. At least, this is the reason that I think was why it was so useful to me.

I was somewhere around 14-15 years of age in the last year of middle of school when I made that fateful decision to read the book.

As like every programmer would like to say, the rest was history!*

Well, in reality, little did I know was on a head-on train collision with my first failure called Dynpet, my first video game. It eventually proved to be the greatest downward spiral I ever felt. (How the hell  I got the weird idea of creating a pet game  for my first real programming project in the first place? Discordia only knows.)

* I apologize to the ghost of could-be future programmers and hackers that were digusted about the small foodstuff that got stuck to the book and decided never ever to try programming again!

Yeah, can you feel the plot just brewing? I hope so.

Happy hacking!
~Kiba

PS. In case you’re wondering, all the projects to me was worth doing it, at least projects that I spent a lot of blood and sweat upon. It wasn’t actual failures in the sense that I learned something, but it wouldn’t suited me to act like I am a guru or something. I mistrust gurus, therefore, I don’t want to pretend that I have some prettty unqiue valuable experiences that everybody could have if they gone through three years of especially gruesome programming games. So I am going to just tell you straight up and honest. How’s that sound?

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