Okay, so, “the shadow over ban pa 2,” huh? Let me tell you, this one was a ride.
It all started with me just wanting to mess around, right? I had this idea kicking around in my head, a sort of continuation of some earlier experiments. Figured, why not give it a shot?
First thing I did was fire up the old dev environment. It’s a bit of a frankenstein setup, honestly. Got bits and pieces from here and there, but it gets the job done. Had to dig through some old files to find the starting point – the code from the first “ban pa” thing I did. It was messier than I remembered, yikes!
Cleaned up the code a bit, just the bare minimum to make it readable. I’m not one for perfect documentation, I just want it to work. Then, I started thinking about what I wanted to add. The first one was kinda basic, so I wanted to throw in some new elements. I was thinking some dynamic stuff, something that changed over time.
So, I started tinkering with the core loop. It was pretty static before, just spitting out the same stuff every time. I wanted to make it…alive, somehow. Added a random number generator to influence some key parameters. That immediately caused a bunch of bugs, naturally.
Spent a good chunk of time debugging. Print statements everywhere! Seriously, the code looked like it had chickenpox. Eventually tracked down the issues to some off-by-one errors and a misunderstanding of how the random number generator actually worked. Fixed those, and things started looking better…but still not quite right.
Next up, I tried adding some visual feedback. The original was just text-based, which is cool and all, but I wanted something more. Hooked it up to a basic graphics library. Simple shapes, nothing fancy. But it gave me something to look at, which made a big difference.
This is where things got interesting. As I was tweaking the visual parameters, I accidentally stumbled upon a really cool effect. It looked like…well, like a shadow, creeping across the screen. It wasn’t what I was trying to do, but it was way better than my original idea. So, I ran with it.
Spent hours refining the shadow effect. Tweaked the colors, the speed, the shape. It was a lot of trial and error. At one point, the whole thing just turned into a garbled mess of pixels. Had to revert to an earlier version and start over. But eventually, I got it to a place where I was happy. Or, at least, happy enough.
Then I added some user controls. Just basic stuff, like being able to adjust the speed of the shadow and change the color palette. Didn’t want to go overboard, just enough to let people play around with it a bit.
Finally, after days of hacking and tweaking, I called it done. “The shadow over ban pa 2.” Not the most original name, I know, but it fit. And honestly, I was just tired of working on it. Pushed the code to my repo, and that was that.
Looking back, it wasn’t the most groundbreaking thing I’ve ever done. But it was fun. And I learned a few things along the way. Plus, I ended up with a pretty cool little visual effect that I can probably reuse in future projects. So, yeah, not bad for a weekend experiment.
- Started with an idea.
- Dug up old code.
- Cleaned up the mess.
- Tinkered with the loop.
- Debugged like crazy.
- Added visual feedback.
- Stumbled upon a cool effect.
- Refined the shadow.
- Added user controls.
- Called it done.
