Over the past couple of years I have been working with a group of friends on a computer game – a political RPG set in classical Rome during the dying days of the Republic. When I started, I was doing piecemeal writing of short events, a few hundred words here and there, for modest, but appreciated pay.
Halfway through last year though, I finished my Master’s, was looking for something to do, and there seemed to be way more programming work to be done on the game than my friend could do alone, so I took up programming for the game as well.
We’re making it using the Unity engine and scripting is done in C#, both of which I’ve had to learn from scratch. Or rather, am still very much learning.
In many ways I enjoy coding more than writing. Usually a programming task comes with a clear idea of what the outcome should be and then it’s a matter of breaking that into chunks and then into single instructions for the computer. With object-oriented programming the process makes me think of connecting blocks, where the blocks are abstractions, made only of logic. It’s relatively clear if a goal has been achieved or not; you run the program and see if it does what you wanted it to do and it will complain loudly, with angry red error messages if you have missed something. And Google is always there to help you find the solution to the next obstacle.
Writing, on the other hand, is always much more ambiguous. When I set out on a piece of writing I have little idea of what it’s supposed to look like in the end and experience shows it almost always ends up drastically different. And even when you have produced something it’s an intuitive and unreliable process deciding whether or not it ‘works’. It’s this uncertainty that leads me to resist starting.