For my Devember project I wanted to start with a simple Tetris game in C++ today. And I found the perfect tutorial by Javier López promising that it would take less than an hour. But there is a catch. I currenty don’t have a C++ IDE installed and while I used Qt when we were doing C++ in university, most people online – including the tutorual – suggest Visual Studio. Great – I thought – that came with my Unity 3d installation. But apparently that was only a 31 day trial and it also asks for login info. I tried creating a new user but the e-mail hasn’t come through yet and the Visual Studio Community Edition is still installing.
So right now it’s 10:25 pm and I’m 25 minutes into what was supposed my hour of coding today and I haven’t written a single line of code so far.
28 minutes: Great news, the e-mail finally came through. Now I’m waiting for the new setup to close itself so that I can open my old installation of Visual Studio. I’m feeling like the worst developer ever right now. Not because those things are uncommon for me but because usually I don’t have to write about them.
33 minutes: While all this is happening in the background I’m reading the tutorial to get a first idea and helping a friend with his Devember goal.
50 minutes: Done with reading the tutorial, VS still not running. Normally I would wait for it to finish and than start coding but it’s been a very long day, so I’ll probably continue tomorrow. However, even though things didn’t went as planned, I did learn some things. For the next game rather than looking for tutorials first thing I will sit down and think about a possible implementation myself first. When I read tutorials everything seems very logical but I want to come up with those things myself. Also I’m now going to use the remaining part of the hour to read about SDL, a library that is used in the tutorial but not explained.