What's up gamers, it's ya boi Phox. 23 yo furry, Pac-Man shitposter, Fennekin and Hisui Zorua appreciator, and occasional hobbyist. I exist, sometimes, also. I haven't decided yet.
I don't really post much of my own stuff, but I do occasionally share NSFW/kink stuff, so please be 18+.
Check out my ask blog! @ask-the-phox-gang
Current project: Exodus
Current icon by me!
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
if it shipped, it works
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
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
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
you can say that about really any skill though, art, writing, audio, whatever, not just code
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.
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
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
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.
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 this house, we stand for the state machines, and we kneel for the super-loops.
They aren't kidding. Scrolled through first file I opened: https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/135934289ec0114bff256f006cacabb18ec9b0aa/desktop_version/src/CustomLevels.cpp#L444
For the main game loop? I feel like I've seen that in Big Name Game code before, in the not-so-distant past
i need to remember this
so much!
i am so focussed on efficiency and making it right all the time that i get lost in it!
