191–200 of 232 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
jwz isn't a fan of this site. Last I checked, if the referer was news.ycombinator.com, it redirected to a testicle in an egg cup.
For anyone who is as curious as me and wants to test it: https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, one of the most vocal advocates of higher code quality is Carmack, who has put out a few games. What I’ve seen is that it’s hard for someone who’s not released a game before and supported it post-release to know where and how you can sacrifice code quality for a faster development time.
> To be fair, one of the most vocal advocates of higher code quality is Carmack His code is full of these antipatterns! One concrete example - magic numbers in Quake. https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/bf4ac424ce754894ac... Doesn't seem to cause him any problems in achieving success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To be fair, one of the most vocal advocates of higher code quality is Carmack His code is full of these antipatterns! One concrete example - magic numbers in Quake. https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/bf4ac424ce754894ac... Doesn't seem to cause him any problems in achieving success.
That's a weighed average with, presumably, hand-chosen coefficients to make a nice visual effect. I fail to see how these numbers are "magic." How would you produce this effect without numbers?
That's not what 'magic numbers' means.
The idea is that you factor out the number into named variables so they don't appear unnamed in the body of expressions.
It’s always great to be able to study the source code for successful, released, real games. I will note that this is actually the source code of the C++ rewrite! The original game was written in Flash, and this version was apparently written by Simon Roth. My impressions: The source code is a bit of a tangle here. There are magic numbers ( https://wiki.c2.com/?MagicNumber ) all over the place, plenty of god classes (…
> The source code is a bit of a tangle here. There are magic numbers ( https://wiki.c2.com/?MagicNumber ) all over the place, plenty of god classes ( https://wiki.c2.com/?GodClass ), and in general you will have to do a bit too much archaeology to figure out what a particular class or member function is supposed to do (the function and class names don’t give you enough, and there are no comments to help out). There a…
Right now, I'm working on a piece of personal productivity software and trying ideas and patterns that I couldn't get away with in building software with others and to the requirements of other people. I can get away with things that are traditionally anti-patterns because I'm the only one it has to pattern to.
I have to imagine indie game dev is a similar sort of getaway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For anyone who is as curious as me and wants to test it: https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
Once you go to the link directly, it appears to work fine coming from HN? It seems to work consistently if you visit (from this thread) in a new tab
Earlier quoted context omitted.
jwz isn't a fan of this site. Last I checked, if the referer was news.ycombinator.com, it redirected to a testicle in an egg cup.
For anyone who is as curious as me and wants to test it: https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is possibly the evilest level I've ever completed in a video game That was the case for me too, until I recently picked up the game Celeste . Some of the C-sides were so evil I just gave up and never beat them (I have a wife and kids, time is limited). This is coming from someone who generally likes hard games (big fan of Dark Souls series, for example, and yes, I know "hard" is relative). The Celeste Chapter 9 gol…
I stopped playing celeste when it was no longer fun for me. I made it about half way through the b-sides before throwing in the towel.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haxe is just a language. However, there are several graphical frameworks that allow for that. Dicey Dungeons (his newest game) is specifically built off the OpenFL framework which tries to replicate the Flash API.
I always used the Flash WYSISWYG editor for the canvas and graphics, so OpenFL isn't a replacement at all in that respect.
Terry Cavanagh is one of the greatest game designers of our time. His simple mechanics and designs often remind me of something like Chess or Go, where a simple ruleset covers a massively deep game, or is used to communicate a story in a very minimalist fashion. Don't Look Back is one of my favorites: https://terrycavanaghgames.com/dontlookback/ A few years back, he did a beta of a game called Four Letter Word... Tho…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is not really out of the ordinary for successful, released, real games Well said. A lot of people will nitpick and talk big about how they would use proper abstraction and write very clean code, but probably none of those people have ever had a successful indie game out.
To be fair, one of the most vocal advocates of higher code quality is Carmack, who has put out a few games. What I’ve seen is that it’s hard for someone who’s not released a game before and supported it post-release to know where and how you can sacrifice code quality for a faster development time.
Most indie devs are trying to crank out a game fast because they have a vision and/or they just want to sell it while the market's hot. Most have no plans on touching the game beyond maybe a couple tiny absolutely essential bugfixes shortly after release. Writing cleaner code is ideal, but that takes planning, foresight, and refactoring. That's loads of time for solo devs or tiny teams to devote which could be otherwise spent making new content entirely.