alt Hacker NewsI remember what a battle it was to 'figure it out' back then
If you were lucky, there was a tutorial how to do X. But requires tool Y. Where do you get Y? Here it is on some apache indexed site! Oh, I just installed Sp0rk3h. Well, time to reformat and reinstall Windows XP. Good thing I partitioned my 40gB HDD
The learning curve for Photoshop 7, when there are 0 resources was pretty tough. I remember how proud I was when I figured out how to make an animated gif. Hammer editor (Was it called Hammer? to make maps for Half-Life engine games like Counter-Strike), There was an editor for creating an archive of images. was it a .WAD archive?
That kind of self-directed learning without hand-holding, I think, is not a bad thing
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I built some homebrew games for the PlayStation Portable circa 2004, in the middle of high school. I had some C and C++ knowledge, but barely knew what I was doing. Setting up the toolchain for building PSP homebrew on Windows XP involved a cygwin instance and all sorts of bizarre compiler and library packages that made almost zero sense to me at the time, and I had pretty much no Unix experience. I remember if I ever got linker errors, I'd just back up my source code (copy the whole dir to "game_backup_20040102" etc), delete everything, and re-do the entire installation from scratch, because I had no idea what a linker was or what the errors meant.
It's wild to me that I actually built and shipped two decent little games with that setup, lol. I put them on Itch a couple years ago: https://coldpie.itch.io/
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As a kid I watched my mom produce plots in Microsoft Excel and even then as a first grader Microsoft Excel had a pretty steep learning curve. Some school computers had the whole creative suite, from Adobe stuff like Photoshop to Macromedia stuff like Freehand and Fireworks. All of these seemed overwhelming to me when I was in the first few years of elementary school.