add new article 'My First Game Development Experience'

content/posts/my-first-gamedev-experience.md

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+---
+title: "My First Game Development Experience"
+date: 2023-07-07T11:07:55-07:00
+draft: false
+tags:
+---
+
+So, I tried making a text adventure game in C, and it was a dumpster fire. Let's talk about that.
+
+## What is a text adventure game?
+
+A text adventure game, or interactive fiction as it's sometimes known, is a type of game where the player inputs commands, similar to a [terminal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_emulator) to progress through the game's story. Here's an example of what that looks like:
+
+```
+You find yourself in an open field.
+
+You see:
+A lamp
+A burly guard
+A cave entrance to the east
+
+--> get lamp
+
+You get the lamp.
+
+--> 
+```
+
+## Why would I make a text adventure game?
+
+My background is primarily in programming and writing, *not* art. Thus, a game that minimizes art and emphasizes programming and writing made the most sense, and that's exactly what a text adventure game does.
+
+## Why would I write it in C?
+
+C is a great programming language for portability (for example, I could port the game to the Commodore 64 pretty easily using [cc65](https://cc65.github.io/)), and I could do basically everything I needed to using just the C standard library, since this game is all about printing text and accepting user text inputs.
+
+## The problems
+
+I bit off way more than I could chew with this game, as a text adventure game like this has a lot of possible things that could happen and needs to have lots of content in order to be even slightly fun. Not a good idea for a first game.
+
+In addition, the codebase wasn't really designed with modifying the game data mid-development in mind, as doing so would require me to rewrite a ton of game logic that relied on specific game data being available to read.
+
+I learned some valuable lessons in making this game, and will try making a game with a smaller scope in the future.