Good points.

Maybe programming a game should be more like instructing actors? With invisible "stage workers" for things that should go on behind the scenes.

@ Erik & badvibration - Agreed. I didn't mean "language" ( hence the quotes ) in the literal sense, but in the way a teacher guides a dancer, or kids explain a game on the street as they go.

OK. Do you have any picture of how that "language" could work/look like, practically speaking?

An "interesting" thing would be if ambiguity in the language could be executed in a non-deterministic way. Of course it would be hell to debug but it could maybe lead to a more organic feel with opportunities for discoveries and "play", like Michaël was talking about.

But then of course there's also this discouraging quote:

"Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail." -- Edsger Dijkstra

Yeah, "code bubbles" is a lot of text. But at least it's presented in a way that emphasis the flow through the code in the same way flowchart-code does. I think its a clear improvement. If you chop up your functions into really short ones (something that code gurus often encourage) you'd get almost (sorta...) the same look as Quest3D (which uses text inside all boxes it seems).

Very interesting to see the "The Path" code. I like that I can remember the shape of the tree and easily go back to places I've "visited". It's pretty hard for me to understand exactly how it works though; for example "if -> A -> Ending?" at the top seems very cryptic

Both "painting with algorithms" and "programming with natural language" seems very intriguing. I know that the program environment Director used to have some kind of programming language that kinda looked like normal english, but they seem to have changed it into something boring c++looking crap. Here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(programming_language)

Argh, after some research it seems like someone has already started working on what I was planning to revolutionize the software industry with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsPX0nElJ0k  I hope they at least don't patent it because I want to use very similar ideas but in a more beautiful and less "corporate" looking way.

Anyway... in a way I totally agree with you Joeren, code can be very elegant and to the point. Expressing "x = 5 * cos(t)" or something with nodes is not going to be an improvement. Also, almost all programming languages lets you define your own words so that you can do things like "if(lion.angry) then human.runAway()" which is very powerful since it reads so nicely. Tracing lines across the screen just doesn't seem as good.

But I also think that code as it looks and works today is definitely sub-optimal for most people and I think it's great if we can think of how to improve upon it. Sounds like a really fun challenge to me! (and would definitely be good for the notgames cause)

Heh, I watched a youtube clip instead. Looks pretty neat.

Ok, cool. Thanks for the info, will try to have a look at it!

This is what I found when looking for examples of Max/MSP:



Yikes! It seems like a lot of these interfaces are bad at encapsulating things; all the code is in one big panel. Just being able to create your own box with the connectors you need and then hiding its contents seems like an obviously good idea. But that must be possible in at least some of these visual languages..?

Cool! I'm curious to hear more about it. Can you share any details about it here?

Yay, glad you're interested! It's just in my head/notebooks still so nothing is final. All I know that it is going to be very visual, but probably not in the flowchart kind of way. More like "climbing" around in the code if that makes any sense I'll post about it here as soon as I have something to show!

[I]

This is a really interesting topic since I'm currently trying to design a kind of programming environment that works exactly the way I would like it to work. It will probably not be completely visual though, since while I do love the idea I have never seen an implementation that scales well. Gamemaker has got a pretty nice one for example, Unreal too it seems (haven't tried it hands on). But when things are getting bigger and hairier the visual clutter removes a lot of the benefits, I think. Anyone got a favorite example to prove me wrong?

Oops, we change newspaper too often in this house. SvD was it. Good anyways!

Congrats on releasing the game and all the positive feedback!!! Saw the interview in the newspaper (DN) today also, it was great (and touched upon a lot of notgamey stuff in an easy-to-understand kind of way). I'm in the middle of the demo now... it's pretty scary

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

I can totally recognize this huge feeling of joy from practicing and improving. It can happen in all fair and competitive games/sports I think. And it can be a fantastic way to spend years, maybe even a whole life. But I think "notgames" has a lot bigger potential than games for being part of a more varied way of life (with all kinds of art, thinking, etc).