this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
44 points (95.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

40302 readers
802 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm trying to make a pocket pet game, like the evolution of all the little calculator screened toys in the 90's and 00's. I don't want it to be the whale hunting, spyware riddled garbage that most phone games are. I'd rather like to release it on F-Droid instead of Google if I release it at all. I have all of it worked out on paper, from the random tables to the creature stats, to the combat mechanics, you can play it as a pen and paper if you wanted to. Problem is, I'm a pen and paper guy, and I'm having an awful time trying to learn anything about code. Where do I go to get help with this?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TokenEffort@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Code isn't that hard to learn, it just looks intimidating trust me.

Gamemaker and unity are free. Anyone can make a game.

Just make it on your own.

[–] Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (4 children)

You're absolutely right about the intimidation.

Is there maybe a guide or something that's more a guide book on common things and less "learn this whole foreign language from scratch"?

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago

The language actually only consists of a relatively small number of verbs. Operations that perform various mathematical and logical actions (such as adding, multiplying, dividing, and, or, xor, bit operations, and comparisons), assignments/reads (put the result of this string of operations in this container for future use or read one back to use it now), conditionals (check if this condition is true, if it is do something), and jumps (instead of going to the next instruction, go somewhere else).

Everything else is just variations or combinations of those four basic things. Don't worry if you don't know what anything is in the following paragraph, it's just explaining how everything else is built on those basic pieces.

Loops are all four put together, functions are assignments and jumps, objects are a way to organize functions and data, polymorphism is a modification that allows replacing function code in variations of the objects. Even IO is just assignments and reads to and from specific memory addresses. Programming language primitives and APIs will simplify doing these (you aren't likely to do IO as those memory mapped operations directly unless you're working on drivers or embedded apps). Sometimes the CPU itself implements special cases, like atomic operations or having multiple cores so you can have multiple threads of execution running in parallel.

When I realized this, it made learning new programming languages much easier. And the internet puts all of the more specific information at your fingertips, especially when you consider all of the free university courses available that go into specializations of the above, plus the other important meta aspect of programming: algorithms.

I suggest you pick a language and just try diving in. The early exercises will seem overly simple, but they'll build a foundation that you can then build more on. For easy to pick up languages, try BASIC, python or lua. Scratch might also help, though it's purely gui based, so might be harder to jump to another language from there (which you'll likely want to do to develop an app).

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)