Well, it took me significantly longer than I expected – most of today – but I can create and… well, I was gonna say reload a character, but now that I think about it, I’ve set it up to reload a character, but not their current state. So that might be an afternoon’s worth of work on the other side of this. (Hopefully, only one afternoon.)

Fortunately, that’s not a problem at the moment. There’s no states to save, because I haven’t implemented anything other than character creation yet.

Honestly, a large chunk of my time was trying to create some .help files, so I could edit them in a text editor and then have the program call them back. I tried about a dozen different things to get it to work, finally did… then tried to save 2 help dictionaries into the same .help file, and God forbid you ask the json parser to have to recognize that there’s 2 dictionaries. I spent 2 more hours trying to solve that, and finally came up with a simple, if inelegant, solution – just make 2 files.  It feels like most of my programming is me having an elegant solution in mind, trying to implement it, and then having to settle for a brute force solution I can actually do.  Then 3 hours after I stop, the elegant solution will occur to me as I’m falling asleep.

At some point, when I’ve licked my wounds, perhaps I’ll venture back and figure out how to do it right, but probably not this project. The help files don’t even have any actual help in them, yet. There’s just lorem ipsum.

I think I’m going to have to sit down tomorrow and do some sketching of exactly how I want the rest of this to work.
I had some good plans, but I’ve since realized that on one hand, there’s some things I’ve expanded since I had that plan. On the other, there’s a few things I spent too much time on to want to scrap – but they don’t really fit for how this thing is looking at the moment.

But this is the first time I’ve spent a full 8 hours programming. Considering one of the reasons I entered this was to give myself a yardstick, because I’m hoping to eventually transition careers to a programmer, this was a pretty good experience.
I think, based on this, I definitely am not changing that ambition for myself, but I’ve also discovered that some of the excitement of solving something is tempered a bit after spending 4 hours banging my head against it. (Also the fact that it’s Sunday, and I worked 50 hours of my actual job this week as well.)

If anyone would like to check out what I’ve got so far on my GitHub.

As if to prove my point, a couple hours after I stopped,  I  realized I was letting the fact it was a dictionary intimidate me. I should have used the same bloody method I was using to save and load player data and then interpret THAT.