So, I got this itch the other day to actually sit down and try coding up some basic character types, you know, like in those old fantasy games. Just simple stuff: a warrior and a magic player. Thought it’d be a fun little exercise, maybe take an afternoon.
I started with the warrior. Seemed easy enough. Give ’em lots of health, strong attack, maybe a basic armor value. That part went pretty quick, actually. Just plugging in numbers, making a function for ‘attack’, another for ‘take damage’. Straightforward. Felt pretty good, like I was making real progress.
Then I moved on to the magic player. And man, that’s where things got bogged down. It wasn’t just health and attack anymore. Suddenly I needed mana, right? How does mana regenerate? Do spells have cooldowns? How much damage should a fireball do compared to a sword swing? What about different kinds of spells – attack, defense, maybe some weird status effect?
Hitting the Wall
It just ballooned. Every little thing I added for the magic player made me think of three other things I also needed. It stopped being a simple afternoon project and started feeling like real work. Getting the balance felt impossible. Make the spells too strong, the warrior is useless. Make them too weak or cost too much mana, and the magic player just stands there getting smacked.
It kinda reminded me of this old project I was on years ago. We had two guys leading different parts. One guy, let’s call him Mark, he was the warrior. Just charged ahead, got things done, brute force approach. Didn’t always look pretty, but he made progress. The other guy, Alex, he was the magic player. Always trying to find the super elegant, clever solution. He’d spend weeks designing this perfect system, thinking about every possible edge case.
- Mark’s stuff sometimes broke later because it was rushed.
- Alex’s stuff sometimes never got finished because it was too complex.
In the end, that project was a mess. We spent more time trying to make Mark’s simple stuff work with Alex’s complicated stuff than actually building the main thing. Just like my little warrior and magic player experiment. The simple part was easy, the complex part was a time sink, and making them work together was the real headache.
So, what did I do with my little code experiment? Honestly, I just stripped the magic player way back. Gave ’em like, two spells. Made the mana system super basic. It wasn’t elegant, wasn’t deep. But it worked, and I could finally put it down. Sometimes, you just gotta simplify, you know? Get something working instead of chasing perfection. The ‘warrior’ approach wins sometimes, I guess. Or maybe just a less ambitious magic player.
