This is not my traditional blog post about Kotlin or Android, today I want to talk a bit about my past and some lessons from a small project I was working on.
Back in 2015 I spent most of my days playing games, Minecraft was the one I liked the most. It was not the basic Minecraft most people know, it was modded Minecraft, a modified version of the game with new blocks, tools, biomes, etc.
I really liked it because it was not just normal Minecraft where you build things most of the time, I don’t like building things just for the sake of building them. Modded Minecraft was different because I could automate almost everything. There was pipes, machines, logistical systems, miners and all the other things I forgot about.
Around that time a desire to create my own mod appeared and that was when I had my first contact with programming. I still have the repository from 2015 around, it’s so cool to see how I coded things back then. Today a lot of things seem obvious to me but these old projects remind me of a time when things weren’t obvious, to the contrary, most of the time they were pretty cryptic.
That was a little bit about my past, now I want to talk about the project I was working on.
7 years later, or more exactly, 1 month ago I had the desire to create a new mod again. I wanted to start a small project I could work on for a few weeks and that would teach me something along the way.
Mining is one of the things I dislike the most in Minecraft because it’s very repetitive. To solve that problem I created Uber Miner 2. If you want to learn more about it you can click the link and even download it yourself.
Lessons
The purpose of this article is not to promote the mod but rather to talk about some things I learned in the past few weeks, so lets jump into that.
Doing something different is painful in the beginning but it’s worth it. The way games work is very different from how apps work, creating the mod was really cool because I was able to see how some parts of Minecraft work.
There’s not much documentation about creating mod but there’s something that’s very valuable, open source projects by other modders. I read at most 4-5 article about creating mods but I read code from many open source mods to see how they were doing things. This is something I haven’t been doing lately for Android projects but should get back into. Seeing how other people do the things you do or what you want to do is a great way to improve your coding skills.
Lastly, knowing when to take a break is very important. I spent hours trying to get a feature to work and it simply didn’t work. The next day I continued working on it but with a fresh mind I tried a different approach and to my surprise that worked.
If you have any question or would like to continue chatting about this feel free to contact me.