Alright, let’s talk about this “shovels city” thing I messed around with. I was bored, you know, and I wanted to see if I could, like, build a city…with code. Sounds crazy, right? Well, it kinda was.
First, I had to figure out what the heck I was even doing. I mean, “shovels city”? What does that even mean? I decided it meant I was gonna generate some kind of layout, like streets and blocks. I’m no city planner, but I figured I could fake it.
The Grunt Work
I started by, uh, “borrowing” some code. I’m not gonna lie, I’m not some genius programmer. I googled around, found some stuff about procedural generation – fancy word for “making the computer do the work” – and started hacking things together.
It was messy. Lots of trial and error. I’d run the code, and it would spit out…garbage, mostly. Like, lines going everywhere, overlapping boxes, total chaos. It looked less like a city and more like a spider on drugs had a go at it.
- First attempt: Total failure. Just random lines all over the place.
- Second try: Slightly better. Got some rectangles, but they were all jumbled up.
- Third time’s the charm?: No way, it was just as the same.
I spent, like, a whole afternoon just tweaking numbers. Changing this, deleting that, copy-pasting bits of code from one place to another. My code looked like Frankenstein’s monster, all stitched together and barely alive.
Making Some Sense of It
Eventually, I started to see some patterns. I figured out how to make the “streets” go in roughly straight lines. Then I got the “blocks” to fit inside the streets, more or less. It still looked pretty rough, but hey, it was progress!
I even added some, uh, “features.” Like, I made it so some blocks were bigger than others. I called them “parks,” because why not? It was all just random, anyway. I felt like a kid playing with LEGOs, except my LEGOs were made of code and kept falling apart.
The “Finished” Product
So, did I actually build a “city”? Not really. It was more like a…suggestion of a city. A drunken sketch of a city. But it was my drunken sketch, and I was kinda proud of it. I even took a screenshot, just to prove I did something.
I’m not gonna show the code, though. It’s embarrassing. It’s like showing someone your messy bedroom. But hey, it was a fun experiment. Maybe next time I’ll try building a…I don’t know, a “digital donut” or something. Who knows?
The takeaway? Messing around with code is fun, even if you don’t know what you’re doing. You might surprise yourself. Or you might just end up with a “shovels city” that looks like a toddler drew it. Either way, you learned something, right?
