randomstranger

You can definitely get a programming job without a degree! Having a degree doesn't really make it that easy because everyone wants senior developers anyway. However, employers know that good developers are hard to find. If you show that you are good then someone will want to hire you, you just need to help them figure it out You could build something cool, make your code all nice and beautiful, then put it on github. People will be able to see how you code and that you're passionate (which seems to be the major buzzword for dev recruitment at the moment). If you google software developer interviews and you can find out what employers are likely to ask you about. Some companies have interview questions on Glassdoor. And four years of engineering school is nothing to sniff at, I'm sure you can spin that to your advantage.

If I was going to make a stereotypical RPG.... here's Cringe Legacy: Insert Weighty Words Here You begin the game by waking up in your mentor's house, where you live. You are sent on a minor errand, which also serves as a tutorial. While you are gone, your village is destroyed. You set out to rescue a young woman from enemy forces. When you succeed, she joins you and falls in love with you (you're a guy, of course). You embark on a quest to collect a set of magical artifacts, visiting contrasting locations around the world. You will have two possible responses to every moral dilemma, one 'good' and one 'bad'. You will gain several other companions: among them are a soldier and a thief. You'll get to explore their personal tragedies/daddy issues as the story unfolds. However, you'll never be able to get more than two of them to cooperate in combat at once. They will also refuse to ever change their clothes. You'll convert an evil character to your side, gaining a deeper understanding of your enemies. You will come across your old mentor and defeat him in combat. You'll have several run-ins with the bad guy, eventually overcoming his plot armour and your cutscene incompetence to defeat him. You will then discover that he's actually second in command to the real Big Bad Guy. Your situation will grow increasingly desperate, but your last-ditch attempt to stop Big Bad will succeed against all odds. The world will feel the echoes of your heroic actions for centuries to come.

I like it as it is Honestly, a lot of this stuff goes right over people's heads. For example, I wouldn't have picked up on the meanings of those names until you told me directly. It would be interesting to find the connections to other literature on my own, but if I didn't (e.g. if I'd never read the bible) then I'd hopefully be able to enjoy the story regardless. In the end, I think it's all about presentation. You can't have too much thought behind the scenes, and all those little details can be intriguing. They can also be tiring when they're forced down your throat. I guess you just have to make a judgment call.

So you want to indicate that the player can't go that way, but you don't want to use visual cues to show that it's blocked? I don't know. Maybe you can use a visual cue that indicates an exit point instead. For example, extending the path one square beyond the rest of the map. Or an obvious sign post. Or just making sure that every time the player sees a path leading off the edge of a map, it goes somewhere. As long as they know what to expect.

'only today did I start writing... still too terrible and expositiony' Well that's hardly fair, is it? Take it easy! I promise you it is not terrible. I feel like I just learned something about aging. Maybe write down some other scenes, then come back and tighten this one up later?

Have you ever watched Cloud Atlas? It has a language kind of like that: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/10/25/the_cloud_atlas_phrasebook_your_guide_to_yibberin_the_true_true_language.html Not a linguist or anything, but a straight cipher doesn't seem like a very likely way for English to evolve because English has many more sounds than the 26 letters, plus we often don't pronounce things the way they're spelled. It might be interesting to look into how the accents of English-speakers around the world have evolved. The vowels get all switched around and sometimes sounds just disappear. Anthony Burgess used Russian words to create a slang language for A Clockwork Orange, so maybe you could get some Latin words in like that. Latin would actually be great because of the link with English. The spells in Harry Potter are mainly Latin and it's great because you can kind of guess what they do. E.g. I don't know 'crucio' in Latin but I know that English 'crucify' is bad, so whenever I see 'crucio' I know it's the torture spell. On the other hand, if the author had just used a string of made-up sounds it would be too hard to remember what the different spells do. Anyway I'm getting off track. Good luck with your project, it sounds really interesting.

Read between the lines! sailing ccccccc

Final Fantasy is not very fun. I've started IV three, possibly four times and never got through even a quarter of it. Then I started VII and couldn't do that either. *hides*

Hate to burst your bubble there but despite whatever 'biology' you learned, breasts really aren't sex organs. Genitals are sex organs. Breasts are for feeding babies and are considered secondary sexual characteristics, same as male facial hair. Men are not actually hardwired to respond to breasts as sex organs. The best evidence of this is all the human cultures where toplessness is completely normal for women and the men don't care (Europe and Africa as well as the indigenous people of Australia and America). You also might be interested to know that women's ankles were considered highly provocative in Victorian culture, but thankfully nobody gives a damn any more if women walk around showing their ankles. Who's to say that boobs aren't just the ankles of today?

ramdp,stramger oops randomstranger that's better

I liked playing as Garrett in the Thief series. Here's one of the many things that make him a great character: he's a thief, but he's a little bit principled. For instance, he doesn't kill (although you can if you want to). It's not because he wants to be the 'good guy', which would be totally hypocritical. He's just being professional.

Protip: programmers will always be more able (and willing) to help you if you indent your code properly and describe the problem fully. What were the hp/atk/other relevant values when you got an unexpected return value of 600? I'm not sure exactly what's wrong, but I doubt that several if/elsif commands are being used. However, it wouldn't be a bad thing at all to cut down the number of elsifs - that's a large number of checks to go through when you're really just using some numbers to determine another number. I would be inclined to do something along these lines: def my_attack_idea(a, inverted_multiplier = 1 - (a.hp/a.mhp) scaled_multiplier = inverted_multiplier * 4 + 1 attack = scaled_multipler * a.atk return attack - b.def end