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AMA from the admin (Jonne) Sticky

A topic by Team Pokitto created Apr 06, 2020 Views: 179 Replies: 3
Viewing posts 1 to 3
Host

Hey! Feel free to ask me anything, about the jam, life universe and how to maintain your hair!


Jonne

Hi Jonne!

What do you think about lazy people who doesn't properly code demo effects? :D

Host(+1)

Hi Manuel and thank you for your excellent question.

This is purely hypothetical, but will illustrate a typical case.

Coder X is making a car game on a limited-resources console. The game is coming along fine, and he (let's assume coder is man this time) adds a fancy intro animation. The animation takes 15-20% of program space. Satisfied with that, the coder dismisses some old coders incoherent warnings to absolutely crunch down the intro. So far so good.

Fast forward an eternity. The game is now almost done. It now takes 210 of about 220 kB of available program space. Coder X is still happy. But, alas! Little does he know that he is already doomed. Storm clouds are gathering around his happy project.

Why is this? Because coder X forgot about sounds. There is not enough space to add them, yet the game cannot be complete without them!

Finally realizing his dire situation, the coder tries to minimize other parts of the game, only to realize it would remove essential elements of gameplay.

"Why, oh why hast thou abandoned me, oh gods of programming?" He asks in despair, pulling his beard and his robes. 

Booming, a sound replies from the pixellated, 16-color dithered clouds. "Manuel, Manuel!" (Coder could be any name, Joe or Alex but we assume Manuel, just for the sake of simplicity) "you say you are thirsty, you are hungry and you suffer. Yet you *hide* something in your robes that will feed your project! Look!"

"My animated intro! Noo! You can not ask this of me!" cries the poor coder. 

"That intro is not essential to gameplay and in any case could be optimized further to save program space - and you *know* it Manuel! Call me back when you have given  some thought to demoscene tricks!" ... and with a giant click of the receiver and a disconnected dial tone the voice from the skies is gone.

Now, something like this might or might not happen in your life, but you would do well to remember this ancient story of how Manuel lost his way.

Wow, that poor man is seriously IN TROUBLE. My condolences.