Beginner takes a crack at a

kninja_pi

I'm ashamed to admit that I've had my Hydra for more than a year and I haven't done much of anything with it.· I've been reading the book on and off, but I've never jumped in and written anything that could be called a game.· The one thing I did write a while ago was a bouncing ball demo which was simply Andre's plot pixel demo from the book with a few changes.· So I started with the bouncing ball this morning.· I added a paddle and mouse control and made it playable.· Then I added a little text to tell the user what to do.· I was intimidated at first, but once I got into it I found it all very easy.

All I've really done is lift certain elements from·the demos to make something pong-ish.· I wouldn't·call Proto-Pong fun, but it is a very basic game and there isn't much code.··I've even tried to make it easy to read.· Hopefully other beginners like myself might find this handy.

AndreL

My philosophy is this; nothing is hard. Whenever you feel that something is complex, intimidating, just think, "there are millions of people that do this..can't be that hard, right?". And this is so true, if you just sit down and take your time, not only are things doable, but its very rewarding when you do them. When I was doing my math degree, I tutored math as well. I can tell you, if you want to experience despair, stress, and students that really think they are stupid, try advanced math tutoring. These poor people were in tears because they had been intimidated by math for years. But, I NEVER found a single person that couldn't do advanced math and get a B, to A. The #1 problem I found was "fear", they would get stuck and then would give up. But, one thing I used to say is this;

1 + 0 = 1
1 + 1 = 2
.
.

Ok, now if you follow that, at some point you are going to discover calculus, number theory, whatever-- and then there is going to be ONE step that you can't do, so what do you do? You just turn the page back in the book and figure it out. Thus, I always found that there was one point where a student had never learned. We conquered that and then it was all easy.

So, as long as you do anything step by step, you can learn it [noparse]:)[/noparse]

Anyway, glad you are getting somewhere with the HYDRA finally, and its a good approach trying to add things to simple demos, then when you feel comfortable try starting from scratch using one of the templates in the book.

Andre'