By Other Means

Sometimes I find myself beating my head against a particular programming problem, trying to force the code, and inevitably it means I’m not thinking in the right way about it. It’s like the Blaise Pascal quote:

I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.

In this most recent incident, I’ve been trying to code seasonal cycles into a game, in which the various variables could be manipulated per-object, per-season, with custom seasons per-object. Don’t ask. Anyways – here I was, beating my head against modulos and switch cases for a day and a half. Then, on a rare run, I got far enough away from the computer to remember that Unity has AnimationCurves, which basically tick all the boxes could want. It took about 14 lines of code to get to work.

It’s just a nice reminder that sometimes the best coding is done with your brain, not your fingers, away from the computer.