NES Game and LiveCoding

Well, I started messing around with making a NES game. I'm not sure I'm ready to tackle another big project right now, and there's still bits of work to be done with Atari Anguna (mostly fixing bugs as they get reported, then getting it ready for production), so I'm doing a little project:  sort of a simple 4-player space race game.

Tonight's tasks was writing the code to support the 4-player adapter, and scrolling the starfield.

The fun part is that I thought I'd try LiveCoding it, which is basically where you live stream yourself writing code and explaining it as you do.  I've tried this for the past 3 nights.  It's a really weird experience.

First, I don't know why anybody would want to watch someone code. I mean, at least watching someone stream video games is interesting because there's a lot of action. Coding is mostly thinking and typing.

Second, it's REALLY HARD.  Now I'm trying to do all my thinking out loud. Which is a really weird process.  Everything feels blurry and sluggish in my head. I feel like I'm not coding well, and not explaining well.  Maybe it gets easier, I don't know.  Then on top of that, trying to actually be somewhat entertaining while coding and talking?  Yeah right.

Third, I'm used to writing my hobby game code in the late evenings, as a way to sort of wind down. Only this doesn't wind me down, it winds me up. I've been finishing a bit after 11, and I'm all jittery and high-strung. There's just no way I can go to bed after spending an hour performing for strangers on the internet.  And I can't really do it sitting next to my wife on the couch as she watches TV, which is normally where the coding happens.

So I don't know how long this will last. On the one hand, it's tons of fun, because I have an audience. On the other, it's exhausting.  But hey, I might as well have fun with it for now.