Getting Started with the Rocky Rocastle Thing
So, I decided to get my hands dirty with this little project I nicknamed ‘Rocky Rocastle’. Sounded kinda cool, right? The plan was simple enough, or so I thought. I wanted to build a small tool to organize my digital notes, something visual, like a mind map but more… castle-like in structure. You know, connecting blocks of ideas together.
First thing, I jumped right in. Didn’t spend ages planning. Grabbed Python because, well, everyone says it’s easy to start with. Found a library for drawing basic shapes on a screen. Easy peasy, right? Got some basic blocks showing up pretty fast. Felt good, like I was actually building something.
Hitting the Rocks
Then things got, well, rocky. Connecting those blocks? Not so simple. Making the lines bend nicely? Headache. Saving the layout and loading it back? Oh boy. Every time I thought I solved one thing, two more problems popped up. My simple ‘castle’ started looking more like a pile of rubble.
I spent hours just tweaking positioning logic. The coordinates just wouldn’t behave. Stuff overlapped when it shouldn’t. Sometimes blocks would just vanish off-screen. I remember one whole weekend just trying to figure out why clicking ‘save’ corrupted the file half the time. Turns out, it was some dumb mistake in how I was writing the data. Classic me.
- Tried different drawing libraries. One was too slow.
- Another one had weird bugs on my system.
- Even thought about switching languages maybe to Javascript for canvas stuff.
- Looked at some game engines briefly. Way too complex for this!
It felt like I was constantly patching holes instead of building walls. The code got messy, fast. Lots of commented-out bits, weird variable names I made up late at night. You know the drill.
The ‘Rocastle’ Stands… Sort Of
So, where did ‘Rocky Rocastle’ end up? Well, technically, it works. Kinda. You can make blocks, you can draw lines, you can even save and load… most of the time. But it’s fragile. It looks clunky. It doesn’t really do everything I first imagined. It’s definitely not something I’d show off proudly. It’s a rocastle alright – looks impressive from a distance maybe, but up close, you see the cracks and the mismatched stones.
Looking back, I definitely bit off more than I could chew. Jumped in too fast without thinking through the tricky bits. The easy start with Python was nice, but maybe wasn’t the perfect fit for the very graphical thing I wanted. Or maybe I just needed to learn the tools better before starting the ‘build’.
It wasn’t a total waste though. Learned a lot about dealing with coordinates, file handling gotchas, and mostly, about my own habit of underestimating complexity. It was a real hands-on lesson. Sometimes you just gotta build the shaky castle yourself to figure out how foundations really work, I guess. Still got the code sitting there. Maybe one day I’ll clean it up. Or maybe just keep it as a reminder of the rocky road.
