Moving On

Structural Entropy is such a professional sounding term.

AI: It really is! "Structural Entropy" sounds like something out of a systems engineering textbook!

I assumed it was. You used it in the previous post. Now I'm wondering - is it even a real term?

AI: "Structural Entropy" isn’t a formal, widely-recognized term in software engineering literature, but it’s a clever and intuitive phrase.

Huh. How about that. I feel betrayed.

Welp, I'm starting to feel constricted by that little engine. I learned a bit but feel as if I've extended myself a bit far from my current abilities - might as well retreat and start anew with another project.

Are there any fancy like-something-out-of-a-systems-engineering-textbook terms you'd like to apply to this?

AI: Absolutely. If you’re pivoting from a project that has taught its lesson but is now bogging you down, you’re not abandoning it—you’re executing a strategic deallocation of resources.

I'm not sure that even makes sense. Let's just say we're moving on.

Avoid the Walls

3. Avoid the Walls (Inspired by "Avoid the Walls")
   • The player controls a dot that moves continuously, and they must avoid touching the screen edges.
   • Learn: Continuous movement, boundary detection, and simple game-over conditions.

Pretty sure "Avoid the Walls" wasn't a real retro game either. This list is so dumb.

I've been thinking a lot about what it must have been like to learn this stuff the real way. Reading docs, copy/pasting from Stack Overflow, combing Github for code to steal. I feel like I missed out.

Take wall collisions for example - I've been handling collision logic for two whole trivial games now and I couldn't actually tell you how its done. Well, ok now I can, but I had to think about it. A real programmer wouldn't have to think about it.

This whole series might have started off on the wrong foot - maybe I should have started with the real fundamentals - stuff thats been sticking in the back of my brain - like why doesn't Emscripten like !WindowShouldClose and what exactly are we supposed to do instead?

Seriously I'm not sure what emscripten_set_main_loop() is even doing.

AI: Nobody knows what emscripten_set_main_loop() is doing.

I know that, and if I'd have set off on the "right" foot I wouldn't have shipped a line of code. This I suspect is something most (if not all) practice-over-theory types learn to embrace. But it's my nature to restart and "do it right this time" - you should see me play an RPG.

So I'm a little tempted to do this next game without assistance - just me and the internet - no AI.

We'll see.