Many games are held together by duct tape
polygon.com
Many games are held together by duct tape
1–10 of 155 posts
Re: Many games are held together by duct tape
#2I've never thought about it but it makes a lot of sense. Just thinking about the few times I had to write some hacky code to get something to work and given the complexity of video games it is kind of expected.
Re: Many games are held together by duct tape
#3To be fair,everybody in web development knows the same thing is true for the internet.
Re: Many games are held together by duct tape
#4To be fair,everybody in web development knows the same thing is true for the internet.
s/web/software/
s/internet/everything/
I can't tell you how many times I have to reteach myself this lesson. I'm not advocating for writing sloppy/bad code on purpose but I fall into the trap way too often of trying to make my code a work of art or overly-clever. No one cares, don't spend twice the time to try to abstract something within an inch of its life. Write working code and move on. Once you've done something 4, 5, 10, 15 times then you can look for an abstraction.
Really I think I use refactoring or "stressing over the best way" really to just be a way to procrastinate and tell myself I'm doing something useful or dare I say noble. Of course in practice it's often neither.
Re: Many games are held together by duct tape
#5To be fair,everybody in web development knows the same thing is true for the internet.
s/web/software/ s/internet/everything/ I can't tell you how many times I have to reteach myself this lesson. I'm not advocating for writing sloppy/bad code on purpose but I fall into the trap way too often of trying to make my code a work of art or overly-clever. No one cares, don't spend twice the time to try to abstract something within an inch of its life. Write working code and move on. Once you've done something…
Agree, though I'd add
s/many games/the world/g
Re: Many games are held together by duct tape
#6A friend of mine in gaming though had an insight I found illuminating. The difference with games though is that there’s often an element of “One and Done” in that unlike much of web development, the starting from scratch for the next generation is more of a given. There is less need for long term support as games are expected to meet its twilight much sooner. With web development however, it is a regular risk assessment and there must be a true meeting of minds to decide that a rewrite is worth it.
Re: Many games are held together by duct tape
#7A friend of mine in gaming though had an insight I found illuminating. The difference with games though is that there’s often an element of “One and Done” in that unlike much of web development, the starting from scratch for the next generation is more of a given. There is less need for long term support as games are expected to meet its twilight much sooner. With web development however, it is a regular risk assessm…
> There is less need for long term support as games are expected to meet its twilight much sooner.
I think this is true for the majority of games.
But I wonder if it remains true for the most successful.
e.g. GTA V released in 2013. Apparently as of 2018 it saw $6B in revenue. Though, surely a lot of this has to do with the new content they introduce to incentivize microtransactions.
Fortnite was a paid early-access game in July 2017, but had a free-to-play battle-royale mode by September 2017. Minecraft came out of beta in 2011.
I can agree with "just ship it, quality of code is not a concern" for an initial release. I wonder how much bad code affects big and successful products, though.
e.g. Ubisoft's Ghost Recon Breakpoint was very buggy, even though it looked like an iteration on the Ghost Recon Wildlands game just two years earlier.
Re: Many games are held together by duct tape
#8A friend of mine in gaming though had an insight I found illuminating. The difference with games though is that there’s often an element of “One and Done” in that unlike much of web development, the starting from scratch for the next generation is more of a given. There is less need for long term support as games are expected to meet its twilight much sooner. With web development however, it is a regular risk assessm…
A lot of games are receiving years or even decades of updates now though, such as minecraft, terraria, factorio, stardew valley, ...
For better or worse, it's nice to get new features in games you love, but it were also great times when you knew a game was "it", when you finished, it was done, and there were no mandatory updates.
Re: Many games are held together by duct tape
#9To be fair,everybody in web development knows the same thing is true for the internet.
And yet every time one starts a new project, we tell ourselves "this time I will do it better!"
I just started a new big project. Wish me luck. It replaces something held together with duct tape and string concatenation in 5000 line files.
Re: Many games are held together by duct tape
#10Watching speed runners play through games is a great way to visualise not only this aspect (that games are flimsy at best), but to visualise the same practice in any software - if you don't code defensively, often a simple mis-input breaks the game.
A common pattern in many speed runs is finding some glitch through a door, and then the game logic kicks in and says "you are past this door, so you must have got the key".
If you are curious, watch the five or so minutes of this speedrun: https://youtu.be/0Ct8n1CClUM?t=3072 First, the player jumps through a game world, getting to a race he shouldn't be able to get to yet. Second, he glitches into the "solid" wall, which is just a thin wall around the racetrack.