Matthew "Queso" Niederberger

There's an incredibly fascinating disconnect in the software world between game programmers and most other software disciplines. Game development is super weird, because we tend to be writing open ended stuff, developer hours seem much more valued because of scope and timelines, strict behavioral requirements are almost nonexistent, performance is always a massive pressure, we're highly suspicious of external code and code reuse, and we literally can't unit test anything because intended behavior is usually changing daily.

I can't imagine working in a world where multiple people are programming against a single spec from multiple directions and be expected to converge in the middle in any sort of usable or timely fashion. I barely know what the skill set of "frontend" and "backend" developers are supposed to be. I don't know how to unit test. Every time we try and use some external library or plugin it usually costs us more time than it would have saved. I can't imagine a world where we have external software dependencies. (We look at the left-pad incident as a scathing indictment of how software is done at all on the web.) Most "software patterns" are usually a mistake to try and use in games because they tend to restrict possibility rather than create it. Almost everything is global state. Multithreading is frequently impossible because all operations happen in real time and are deeply interconnected.

So little software advice actually makes sense to apply to games and would result in unusable codebases and leave you in dev hell for decades, and all the things we do in games sound insane and like things that would get you fired in the rest of software.

Is that you can make a game, get sales to keep the studio lights on, see notable streamers play it, all the usual signs of a successful title, but have almost nobody "talk" about your game. People don't post their whims and off the cuff reviews on social media like they used to. Barely anyone reviews indie games at all, and mostly just the big titles. The most thoughtful comments I've seen are from steam reviews.

Good programming is when you use a long instead of an unsigned long just so you can use the single negative value -1 to indicate a special value.

It's actually a ton of fun to start at a baseline and put your own twist on it. There's nothing wrong with that! Just like there's nothing wrong with starting from near scratch! But for me, I love taking an underdeveloped idea in a work or in a genre and bringing it into focus without having to reinvent the wheel. I find it really satisfying. Where I often find building up an entire world of ideas into a single piece of work really exhausting, because that leaves me so little room to chase down the ideas that really catch my interest.