• they/them

ttrpg designer
trans / t4t / alloroace
(and not looking)
disabled / rat therian
partner of @Lark-in-ink
huge nerd since 1976
HRT since 1998
(art credit: @robinandcat)


mogwai-poet
@mogwai-poet

which consists of people looking at a screenshot of code that is straightforward and getting angry that it's not more complicated.

I'd just like to posit here that a straightforward solution is an excellent default and you should have a really solid argument for the advantages of a complicated solution before you choose it.


tef
@tef

every time there's a "look at this gamedev code" post, it's usually from a cs graduate, often fresh.

for them, code is a means to demonstrate knowledge

they've never been tested on "making things maintainable" or "exploratory programming", but they have had to spend exam after exam writing code to show that they know fancy tricks. the idea that code can be boring is almost anathema.

this habit continues well into their career: you don't have to look further than a technical interview or code review to see more senior programmers setting up elaborate games to show how clever they are.

that's why when they bump up against gamedev code, be it 5000 if statements, or three state machines lovely crafted into a powerset to handle events, it just feels wrong. the code works, does what it needs to, but no-one gets to feel smart about it. what gives?

"i get it, you've only seen code in a textbook"


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in reply to @mogwai-poet's post:

in reply to @tef's post:

I'm reminded of this one time I saw someone try to launch a crusade against some game based on the filesize of the game's code minus any assets. The logic was literally "they raised all this money on Kickstarter to make not even a megabyte of code."

I also think (without having every done any game dev) that plasticity of code is uniquely important to game dev. Someone who builds CRUD servers for a large company such as myself is operating under fundamentally different constraints, timelines and goals than an indie game developer does. It shouldn't surprise that "what good code looks like" is different