Matthew "Queso" Niederberger

@Queso2469

Game programmer, designer, director; retired quadball player; antimeme; radical descriptivist; antilabel; Moose;

Working at Muse Games. Directed Embr, worked on Wildmender and Guns of Icarus, Making new secret stuffs

Opinions are everyone else's

Matthew "Queso" Niederberger @Queso24699/1/2023, 1:01 AM

Heather "hthrflwrs" Flowers @hthrflwrs

d🔶@geometric9/1/2023, 12:19 AM

i honestly think an indie dev's programming ability should be just good enough to get the project out the door and no better

you should not be a 10x engineer or whatever, you should be focusing on the vision and ideas and emotions that make your project interesting and beautiful and touching. some of the greatest indie games of all time have absolutely nightmarish codebases because the creator was rightly focused on the player experience

#it can be helpful to learn to code smarter #but don't let it slow you down #keep rolling and use what you learned for the next game

Heather "hthrflwrs" Flowers @hthrflwrs9/1/2023, 12:43 AM

literally exactly this

#i spent an entire year trying to build a game engine #so i could have a more elegant codebase #and every extraneous hour i spent programming #is an hour i could have spent writing #or designing or marketing or producing or any of the many things that i am Better At

Matthew "Queso" Niederberger @Queso24699/1/2023, 1:01 AM

The only good code is code that delivers your intended experience

Code that is beautiful, code that is elegant, code that is efficient, code that follows standards, code that is well commented, code that is well organized, is all meaningless if it does not deliver the intended experience.

#indie dev #indiedev #gamedev #game dev #okay but like do comment your code and make other people able to read enough of it to make changes or at least figure out which systems to throw out if literally anyone else is going to touch your code #programming

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in reply to @geometric's post:

Jess🌺@CyanSorcery9/1/2023, 12:32 AM

makes me think about how sometimes I'll write a shader or do some code or sprite that's really good

TOO good

so I have to make it shittier because I'm like, is this what I want the standard of the rest of what I do on this game like? and the answer is, haha nooooo

d🔶@geometric9/1/2023, 12:33 AM

lol this is so real

Coda @Codarobo9/2/2023, 4:13 PM

This is why i never release albums. By the time I’m “done” I’ve managed to make a song good enough that it makes the older parts of the album feel not good enough. And then the cycle begins anew lol

Jess🌺@CyanSorcery9/2/2023, 6:57 PM

I've gotten over this with video games because I'm like, every game has those couple of songs that you just go "yea that's not that great" but it's like whatever

Kel @Keloti9/1/2023, 1:51 AM

Thank u for the grace

@bobthebob9/1/2023, 10:56 AM

you can say that about really any skill though, art, writing, audio, whatever, not just code

d🔶@geometric9/1/2023, 11:03 PM

code is different because the player experience can be identical whether your code is a mess or not. Everything else you listed is player facing and its improvement will be felt in the end product.

@bobthebob9/2/2023, 1:45 PM

sure, it can be identical, but i think it's wrong to say that it generally will be, personally my experience with code tends to inform the stuff i can do with gameplay, visuals, etc. it fundamentally changes my approach to development, and so influences pretty much every aspect of the game. without code experience i might not think to implement my player movement in a specific way, or to write a specific shader that influences the visuals of my game without the significant experience i have with code

@bobthebob9/2/2023, 2:32 PM

also like, even if those the disciplines you listed were inherently more important to player experience than code (which as i said, i really don't agree with), i still don't see why that'd mean being "good enough" at them to finish your game isn't still the way to go, as you said you should be focusing on your vision and ideas, which doesn't necessarily mean great art or writing or anything specific, it all depends on the game

torcado @torcado9/2/2023, 8:49 PM

god, 100% agree. i'm all for striving to make things faster and less computationally expensive, but in my eyes video games are almost completely at the "art" side of the spectrum, and for that reason i think any technical means justify the end of it existing at all. it's not a coincidence that some of the best games are this way. i dont care that your rendering pipeline takes 0.2ms to render, i just want to see the little dude move around funny.

Azure @AzureLazuline9/4/2023, 7:34 PM

there are some parts of the code you should take the time to do right. The more unrelated systems that need to interact with a thing, the more solid you'll need it to be. If it's a system that's at the core of the entire game, one extra day of planning today could prevent a month of frustrating bug whack-a-mole that gets in the way of you adding the stuff that matters. But if it's just one enemy type or one weapon that's self-contained? Churn that thing out in ten minutes by whatever means you can! The worst thing that can break is itself.

i broadly agree with you that gamedevs get way too stuck on trying to make everything bulletproof, but learning when to be careful is very important wisdom too. It mostly only becomes an issue in larger projects though... and everyones' games are too big, which i suppose is the real problem!

in reply to @hthrflwrs's post:

d🔶@geometric9/1/2023, 1:46 AM

In your case, you have a few (excellent) shipped games under your belt, so I don't think diving a bit deeper on the technical side and exploring options was a waste, especially in prepping for a more ambitious project. But yeah, it's important to keep perspective and not get bogged down in it.

Heather "hthrflwrs" Flowers @hthrflwrs9/1/2023, 2:37 AM

fair and true!

@garak9/1/2023, 1:59 AM

I mean, Colin's idea of a Grand Prix car was it should win the race and, as it crossed the finishing line, it should collapse in a heap of bits. If it didn't do that, it was built too strongly.

Versions of this quote abound with various attributes, but this one is supposedly Innes Ireland on Colin Chapman (about F1 racing).

This quote has been immensely influential to me in how I think about design in any context. Everything about everything could be better, but as soon as there's a limited resource (money, weight, time) the goal flips to understanding your constraints so you can ride them as tight as possible.

Heather "hthrflwrs" Flowers @hthrflwrs9/1/2023, 3:20 AM

absolutely!

Binary @binary9/1/2023, 3:28 AM

God that quote rules.

Fallible Algebra @fallible-algebra9/1/2023, 7:34 AM

The times I've shipped a game have been the times i stopped myself trying to be smart in the codebase. The times I've had a project sit and stagnate are cos I wanted to prove to myself I'm a good engineer.

Fallible Algebra @fallible-algebra9/1/2023, 8:24 AM

I spent 18 months one time down a rabbit hole of "I want a bespoke programming language and runtime I can manipulate as a user-facing game mechanic" and not only did it take 18 months it also took a good chunk of my health with it.