Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Simpson’s Hit & Run and Fallout 3 come to mind
The entire Fallout series, lol. Just played Fallout 2, and there's still unpatched game breaking bugs in there.
The bugs are half the fun :)
I learned Unity the wrong way
81–90 of 124 posts
Re: I learned Unity the wrong way
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
See, I would probably have been the guy that ignores the dest part. On purpose. Just to see whether this pile of poo shits itself and how much. I would also recognize what happened when I see the error messages though and then silent quit until I've been with you guys for long enough my resume doesn't take a hit just because your interview process duped me into starting at your place. Yes this sounds harsh. I know. N…
haha I would totally empathize with you. But see, you would realize immediately that it doesn't work and why, but you are smart enough to realize it and would just rename the folder (as mentioned in the readme as the very first thing to do), hit build and voila, everything works as expected, instead of sending me log files, letting me debug your errors, ignoring my repeated instructions, waste my time helping you deb…
Hehehe, definitely been there and dealt with that guy that I definitely didn't let pass his probation period. I see we do understand each other.
And I might not silent quit right away and try to actually improve things and see how it goes/how you "let me".
This does actually remind me of my very first job actually. It's been many, many, many years now. I found a stinking pile of disparate shell and perl scripts that made up the "backend" of the application I was hired into working on. Grown histerically for almost 15 years prior to me being hired fresh out of university. I started extracting common library code out of every single one of these every time that I was tasked with adjusting one of those scripts. I introduced a proper deployment from source control to production the second time I "broke" something, because someone had previously fixed a bug directly in production and forgot to check the fix into source control (and no, I didn't believe that it was not the guy that was working on the project w/ me for one second after seeing how they coded and how they defended everything that was bad about that pile of poo and how "it's too complicated to do X".
Well guess what, this new grad did all of that anyway. Without AI and without IDE refactoring support (I mentioned Perl and shell scripts, did I?) and without a single QA person in sight. And yes, every single one of the readers here very probably has bought a product that was "touched" by that software, without knowing, since it was an in-house administration tool.
Re: I learned Unity the wrong way
#83The very first mistake you made was using Unity. Start from scratch. A game loop is really just draw(), update() positions in a loop. Even smaller effects can be done with simple programming.
Recently I played around with ChatGPT for some effects for JS game, the results were interesting and very experimental.
3D game is another beast altogether and linear algebra needs to be very solid for that.
Re: I learned Unity the wrong way
#84Re: I learned Unity the wrong way
#85Hey, I'm the original author. Thanks for sharing this. I saw a spike in my analytics and couldn't figure out where it was coming from, now I know :)
Just wanted to say I loved this article. In a way it didn't say anything "new", and yet all the anecdotes were spot on and I really liked the writing style.
Re: I learned Unity the wrong way
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear you, but I still feel for the coworker, and if I newly joined a company and learned on my first day that they are failing the Joel Test[1] here in 2026, I would get that sinking feeling in my stomach that I made a huge mistake. There is no longer a valid excuse for having a build like that. "It's documented..." and "Nobody wants to touch..." "Not worth it to..." "Can't justify..." are all huge red flags. 1: ht…
Nice list, somehow I missed that one. I love Joel's wisdom. The full build literally works in one step but the main prerequisite is to perform a few git clone commands which can be copy/pasted from the readme. Can't help it if they want to manually do git clone and let it name folders incorrectly and then subsequently ignore compiler errors and my advice to rename. Changing our antiquated workflow would have required…
See, you are probably right about that new hire. But the way you say things here, you do come across (at least to me) as "that guy". You know? "That guy" that says "we've always done it this way and that is why it's good and why we still do it that way".
What happened to "never change a running system" is that if the system is barely running at all, you better do change that system.
If I'm the new guy and you tell me how to do things and those things seem bad and there's no explanation for why they need to be that way, I'll also ignore you, coz I know how I want to do things and how things can be done better. Don't tell me to do things X way. Many roads lead to Rome and some are better than others. See my other reply. At my very first job I was also told how things work and how to do things. But things sucked and so I made them better anyhow.
Now, in the other part of the thread you also did mention how they just sent you error logs without reading and thinking about them themselves and such. That definitely is a red flag and the kind of thing that will make me fail someone's probation period. Definitely. But just because someone doesn't think that "the way we've always done things" is a good reason to keep doing something bonkers is where I'm no longer with you. And again, probably just your wording/what you disclose in various parts of these threads but it explains why "we concentrate on certain things only" ;)
Re: I learned Unity the wrong way
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel there was a very narrow time window in the 90s when a bunch of game franchises were started where the devs could get away with shipping stuff with a ton of bugs. The first two Fallout games come to mind. So does the original Deus Ex. This is definitely the exception not the rule though! Hardware constraints weed out shitty (or at the very least suboptimal) code very quickly. This is the exception not the rule…
I think maybe that was just when YOU were playing games, because games today still ship with tons of bugs - it usually isn't until a few years later that there is stability
Yeah try some early access games! I also don't remember thinking the games he mentioned were particularly buggy at the time. They worked fine for me on my PC. Why are you so sure they were unusually buggy? Just curious. You may be comparing what you heard to what you have seen.
Re: I learned Unity the wrong way
#88- as a non gamedev i keep asking this question since i dont get a satisfactory answer like ever
- if i want to make a 3d third person tactical shooter from scratch) without unreal, unity, godot etc what is the exact flow
- i know c++ and have a decade of programming experience. i am revising 3d math from that awesome 3d math primer book
- what are the steps?
if you asked me to write a program to take a postgres backup i would say, the steps are
- spin a docker container for postgres 18.1
- perform a pg_dump using directory format
- take a tar archive out of that directory
- create a brotli archives out of the tar archive above as it doesnt work directly with directories and gives better compression than tar
- copy the file from container to host
- shut the containers down
- can someone give me an overview along the above lines for gamedev?
Re: I learned Unity the wrong way
#89- as a non gamedev i keep asking this question since i dont get a satisfactory answer like ever - if i want to make a 3d third person tactical shooter from scratch) without unreal, unity, godot etc what is the exact flow - i know c++ and have a decade of programming experience. i am revising 3d math from that awesome 3d math primer book - what are the steps? if you asked me to write a program to take a postgres backu…
There is an ocean between the level of complexities of the examples you gave. For the database side, it would be the equivalent of "write postgres from scratch", not "how do I take a postgres backup", assuming you want to do no frameworks at all (like you qualified for the game side).
Re: I learned Unity the wrong way
#90- as a non gamedev i keep asking this question since i dont get a satisfactory answer like ever - if i want to make a 3d third person tactical shooter from scratch) without unreal, unity, godot etc what is the exact flow - i know c++ and have a decade of programming experience. i am revising 3d math from that awesome 3d math primer book - what are the steps? if you asked me to write a program to take a postgres backu…
Are you interested in the graphics (how to render 3d, opengl/directx, shaders etc), in the “game engine” aspect (all of the various parts of a game coming together), game design, networking, or something else? All of it?
As people used to say on stack overflow - what have you tried so far?
Also - this might be a good starting point: https://www.gameenginebook.com/