on writing games

the programmer writer

Many writers have a bit of aversion to technology.

The same goes for many game designers.

I am of the opinion that if you are going to work on creating interactive experiences, you have to learn how to code.

Mind you, I’m not referring to learning how to build an operating system from scratch, with a bootloader and all.

No, I mean understanding the mechanics of programming.

Being able to express a logical idea in some kind of language.

The reason for this is that there are certain mental constructs that programming teaches that greatly help organize your ideas and enable how to express them.

You need to understand the basic mechanics of decision making (if), how to express truth values (true, false, and, or, xor), and grasp the foundation of program flow (while, for).

This is necessary to make good use of variables and to react to state.

The ability to abstract in terms of decision logic is a very valuable tool for creating dynamic stories, and it needs to be trained.

If you know how to code, good, not much for you here.

But if you have no idea about programming, why not take a free introductory course, something simple? What do you have to lose?

Eventually the mental models will form, and things will be way easier.