So, I decided to mess around and build a derby horse game. Yeah, just a simple one. I’d seen those arcade ones, and thought, “Hey, I could probably knock out a basic version of that.” It wasn’t for any grand reason, mostly just to see if I could and to have a bit of fun with code again, you know, away from all the serious stuff.
First off, I had to figure out how to even represent the horses. I wasn’t going for fancy graphics, not at all. Just text characters. So, I had like, Horse A, Horse B, and so on. Or maybe just numbers. The simpler, the better, that was my motto for this one. Then, making them move. That was the first little puzzle. I just set up a loop, and in each ’round’, each horse would move forward a random number of steps. Easy, right? Well, mostly. Sometimes one horse would just shoot off like a rocket, and others would barely crawl. Kinda funny to watch, actually.
Next up, actually making it a race. I needed a finish line – just a set number, say, 50 steps. The first horse to reach or pass that number would be the winner. Keeping track of who was leading and who finally won involved a bit of logic, a few `if` statements here and there. Nothing too crazy, but you still gotta get it right, otherwise, the whole thing’s a bust.
I remember thinking about adding features, like:
- Different ‘skill’ levels for horses.
- Maybe a super simple betting system.
- Giving the horses silly names.
But then I thought, nah, let’s keep it pure. The original goal was just to get them racing. I was using Python for this, by the way. Just vanilla Python. No fancy libraries or game engines. I find that sometimes, for these little personal projects, it’s more satisfying to build it from the ground up with basic tools. You learn more that way, I reckon, or at least you remember how the simple stuff works.
There was this one point where I had a really dumb bug. For about an hour, one of the horses would just get stuck, or sometimes even move backward! I was pulling my hair out, thinking I’d messed up some fundamental logic. Turned out to be a stupid typo in a variable name. Classic, right? Always the simple things that trip you up.
You know, working on this little derby game, it reminded me of something. Years ago, I was on this massive project at a company I used to be with. We were building this incredibly complex system, meetings after meetings, endless discussions about architecture, frameworks, scalability – you name it. Everyone was so stressed, trying to make this perfect, all-singing, all-dancing thing. And it dragged on forever. Then here I am, spending a weekend afternoon, making little text horses run across a screen, and the feeling of accomplishment when it finally worked? Honestly, it was more satisfying than some of those big ‘wins’ on that corporate project.
It’s funny, isn’t it? Sometimes we get so caught up in making things complicated, in using the latest and greatest, that we forget the joy in just making something simple that works. This horse game, it wasn’t going to change the world. It wasn’t going to make me any money. But it was a good reminder that you can get a lot of satisfaction from just building something, no matter how small. And seeing those little digital horses chug along to the finish line? Yeah, that put a smile on my face. That’s all I was really after.
