4 ms·

I'd actually try to recruit raxod502 at the high-school senior level. It certainly shows passion and commitment. You just need to grok the higher level abstract

by indescions_2017 9y ago

I'd actually try to recruit raxod502 at the high-school senior level. It certainly shows passion and commitment. You just need to grok the higher level abstractions. And may in the end even find your "spaghetti" version is actually more performant at run time ;) The thing is you sort of need to write like this for the first draft of your first game. And Terraria is pretty ambitious. Considering most people struggle with BlackJack or Pong or Snake!

apo 9y ago
Writing code in spare time, not to mention 11,000 lines of it, already sets any high schooler (or any beginning programmer) apart from the majority of peers. It's shocking how little students in "AP" computer science courses actually end up doing, and how few do anything outside of class. Given the choice between interviewing a student who had produced nothing but verbiage and one who had produced TerrariaClone, I would go with the latter without even thinking about it.
- criley2 9y ago
  I had a rather unique AP Computer Science high school experience a number of years ago. The AP class was mainly a self or group study class inside of a lower level programming class. We didn't get as much directed study, but we basically were allowed to chose projects that interested us and spent a lot of time developing them and getting help, iterating, figuring it out. We ended up doing only OK on the AP exam, but we had built a pretty impressive little java app by the end. A scrolling tile based map, enough network code to run a chat and let users join, and we had started building some game logic on top of our multiplayer game room. Very cool and informative, but not exactly what the AP exam was looking for.
  - johnvonneumann 9y ago
    Comments like this kill me a little on the inside, I can't stand having real work devalued for the sake of contrived assessment criteria.
    - jackmott 9y ago
      well the AP comp sci test stuff is not all contrived. it is also useful to know (mostly)
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - cl0ne 9y ago
    I had a similar experience in high school. I took a "Technology" elective class where most people were just playing Warcraft III because the teacher didn't really care what we did. I don't remember him actually teaching us anything. A few of us spent the time working on our own real-time strategy game written in Java and using Anim8tor for 3d models. By the end of the year we had a map, artwork, and some network code to allow multiplayer. You could place buildings, select units, move, attack, etc. My friend found the source on an old USB drive a couple years ago and we were able to get it running again. Some of the code was hilariously bad, but we were both impressed that we had been able to get that far and that it worked since we didn't really know what we were doing. Fun times :)
- moomin 9y ago
  When I was 12 (and computers weren't really a thing) I wrote an RPG. In ZX Spectrum Basic. It wasn't great (let's be honest, TerrariaClone sounds like the Mona Lisa in comparison), but it worked. I didn't realise at the time that this weird little hobby of mine would stick me right at the front of an emerging field. Nor did my family who thought I should be doing.. almost anything else. I got ridiculously lucky, all because I started writing bad computer games in high school.
- lubujackson 9y ago
  It's particularly encouraging to see it posted with mistakes. Sure, it's a bit of a joke, but it's also an experience to learn and grow from. Reflecting on past projects is so rare that I think it might be the best indicator of a programmer who will continue to improve.
jackmott 9y ago
I did pong in rust to learn some rust, and it got me thinking how, doing pong was really easy (as an experience programmer) but if you wanted to do pong "properly", say supporting 4 different platforms, 5 languages, proper settings menu and high score table, supporting all manner of screen resolutions, full screen and windowed, sound, all popular controllers (keyboard, mouse, mobile input, game pads, joysticks) etc etc etc then even pong is pretty hard.
- mikestew 9y ago
  I've often said that a team couldn't ship a production-ready version of Tic-Tac-Toe in less than a month...even if the implementation were already written.
azr79 9y ago
> And may in the end even find your "spaghetti" version is actually more performant at run time not with those O(N^2) loops it ain't

apo 9y ago

Writing code in spare time, not to mention 11,000 lines of it, already sets any high schooler (or any beginning programmer) apart from the majority of peers. It's shocking how little students in "AP" computer science courses actually end up doing, and how few do anything outside of class. Given the choice between interviewing a student who had produced nothing but verbiage and one who had produced TerrariaClone, I would go with the latter without even thinking about it.

criley2 9y ago
I had a rather unique AP Computer Science high school experience a number of years ago. The AP class was mainly a self or group study class inside of a lower level programming class. We didn't get as much directed study, but we basically were allowed to chose projects that interested us and spent a lot of time developing them and getting help, iterating, figuring it out. We ended up doing only OK on the AP exam, but we had built a pretty impressive little java app by the end. A scrolling tile based map, enough network code to run a chat and let users join, and we had started building some game logic on top of our multiplayer game room. Very cool and informative, but not exactly what the AP exam was looking for.
- johnvonneumann 9y ago
  Comments like this kill me a little on the inside, I can't stand having real work devalued for the sake of contrived assessment criteria.
  - jackmott 9y ago
    well the AP comp sci test stuff is not all contrived. it is also useful to know (mostly)
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- cl0ne 9y ago
  I had a similar experience in high school. I took a "Technology" elective class where most people were just playing Warcraft III because the teacher didn't really care what we did. I don't remember him actually teaching us anything. A few of us spent the time working on our own real-time strategy game written in Java and using Anim8tor for 3d models. By the end of the year we had a map, artwork, and some network code to allow multiplayer. You could place buildings, select units, move, attack, etc. My friend found the source on an old USB drive a couple years ago and we were able to get it running again. Some of the code was hilariously bad, but we were both impressed that we had been able to get that far and that it worked since we didn't really know what we were doing. Fun times :)
moomin 9y ago
When I was 12 (and computers weren't really a thing) I wrote an RPG. In ZX Spectrum Basic. It wasn't great (let's be honest, TerrariaClone sounds like the Mona Lisa in comparison), but it worked. I didn't realise at the time that this weird little hobby of mine would stick me right at the front of an emerging field. Nor did my family who thought I should be doing.. almost anything else. I got ridiculously lucky, all because I started writing bad computer games in high school.
lubujackson 9y ago
It's particularly encouraging to see it posted with mistakes. Sure, it's a bit of a joke, but it's also an experience to learn and grow from. Reflecting on past projects is so rare that I think it might be the best indicator of a programmer who will continue to improve.

jackmott 9y ago

I did pong in rust to learn some rust, and it got me thinking how, doing pong was really easy (as an experience programmer) but if you wanted to do pong "properly", say supporting 4 different platforms, 5 languages, proper settings menu and high score table, supporting all manner of screen resolutions, full screen and windowed, sound, all popular controllers (keyboard, mouse, mobile input, game pads, joysticks) etc etc etc then even pong is pretty hard.

mikestew 9y ago
I've often said that a team couldn't ship a production-ready version of Tic-Tac-Toe in less than a month...even if the implementation were already written.

azr79 9y ago

> And may in the end even find your "spaghetti" version is actually more performant at run time not with those O(N^2) loops it ain't