Rob Burrito said:
sweet, wanted to mention the new template was super easy to work with coming from the easy6502 site. if anything too easy haha.
There are three reasons why I approach the challenges the way I do. The templates are the way they are so that a person following my tutorials doesn't have to stray too far from what I've already taught. Once I've covered the important commands then the challenge templates might start looking like the following:
Code:
define SolutionVariable $00
;Write the solution to the challenge here.
At least, as long as we're covering the basics. Once we get into NESMaker specific stuff the challenge site will have pages without the simulator, instead having blocks of ASM code to download or copy into a file for use with NESMaker itself. I guess then I'll still be asking people to post their ASM code here, but then I'll be plugging each person's work into NESMaker to see if it works as the challenge suggests.
The second reason is the fact that I'm trying to keep these accessible for people that have never written a line of code in their lives. NESMaker is attracting a lot of non-coders, and I want to show people that the coding part isn't nearly as scary and intimidating as they seem to think.
The last reason is honestly the most damning of them, and that reason is that I honestly have zero teaching experience. I've tried to help people learn things in person (I'm my family's techie), but I've never tried teaching a programming course, so I really have no idea how much exposition is optimal for people to get the most out of this without causing non-coders to feel overwhelmed.
Rob Burrito said:
there's not much out there in the form of exercises relevant to nes games or game making in general, so these are really helpful getting some understanding of how the commands are relevant to games.
As soon as NESMaker 4.1.0 comes out I'll open the gates to NESMaker specific code. After I cover this last basics episode my plan was to start digging deeper NESMaker's code, but I don't want to do that when large blocks of code are going to change. It'd be really bad to tear down and write new scripts only for people to encounter this in the future and it not make any sense because the code-base is entirely different.
Rob Burrito said:
looking forward to more, and thanks for the follow up on some stack insight!
I'm glad you're enjoying the tutorials! I'm very glad to be making them. I hope these tutorials help prove that if someone who's not even been using 6502 ASM for two months can learn and begin teaching it, anyone who wants to put forth the effort can do it. I've actually been testing all of the presentations on a friend of mine who I'd consider a non-coder to get feedback on where parts are confusing or where I've worded something poorly.
As for the information on the Stack, curiosity is one of my main driving factors. I didn't know the answer to that myself so I decided I'd try it out and see what I found out.
Thank you very much for the input!