So first and foremost, I have to make an apology. I wanted to spam the LD community with tons of blog posts during game development, but I wasn’t able to. Why not? Well… (apart from the website crashing and all that… )

Python, it turns out, is an amazing language to code games in. The greatest part for me is that the iteration process from code to test to code is incredibly quick, and error fixing is a breeze. Contrast with languages like Javascript where you often have to spend comparatively more time tracking down bugs and correcting for silly errors you made (like accidentally adding an integer to a string instead of another integer).

What this means is that I was flying through code. I think that in the first 6 hours after I woke up I had written about 500 lines of code, which is an astonishing rate for me. But then I stared to notice that my wrist was starting to hurt. I kept going, figuring that it was probably nothing, but then at about 2pm I realized I needed to stop coding because my wrist was killing me.

For the first time, I had reached my limits. I had never written so much code in such a short amount of time.

This was actually really terrifying for me, and I had a ton of thoughts fly through my head. I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to finish my LD game because my wrist was going to slow me down immensely. I was worried I was going to develop RSI or carpal tunnel. I was just generally freaking out since nothing like that had happened before.

So I took a break. I went to eat lunch. Then I went and picked up a guitar and played the song you hear in the background. Then I realized my wrists still hurt, so I worked on graphics for a few hours. Then I did some google searching to see what people do in problems like these. Turns out that these kinds of problems are why people invented those weird looking ergonomic keyboards, and I conveniently had one lying around, so I used it.

That keyboard was the saving grace of the project. It is much less intensive on the wrists for some reason I can’t quite figure out – your wrists don’t move around as much for some reason. Without the keyboard, I probably would have gotten stuck halfway through, which would have been really depressing!

On the other hand, I did lose about ten hours of time that I could have really used to improve my game further. It’s a shame that it happened, but I’ve learned from it, and it’s also a mistake I won’t make again.

So, tl;dr: If you’re a coder, I highly recommend getting a split keyboard to code with, especially during competitions. Save your wrists from pain!

Finally, if you want to see what I suffered through pain to bring you, check it out: Escape Artist

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2011 at 5:05 pm and is filed under LD #21. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.