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Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

handmadehero.org

21–30 of 79 posts

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#21
post #6

I have no delusions of having enough time to ever follow through all of these videos, but it's still an idea that appeals to me. Something I'm curious about though: If I wanted to follow along on a Mac instead of Windows, how different of a process am I looking at?

Seems like it was ported over (the code anyway): https://github.com/itfrombit/osx_handmade

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#22

Wow this is crazy; I'm surprised its still going on after all this time. Doesn't seem healthy imo to stick just one project for so long without significant ROI. But yes, commendable indeed, and I hope people got significant value out of it, for his sake.

I think it has healthy funding from his Patreon account, plus the $15 to buy the game, as well as serving as sort of inadvertent PR for his upcoming commercial game (1935.)

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#23
post #6

I have no delusions of having enough time to ever follow through all of these videos, but it's still an idea that appeals to me. Something I'm curious about though: If I wanted to follow along on a Mac instead of Windows, how different of a process am I looking at?

You can start with handmade penguin, which uses SDL2 instead of the windows API, this should be relatively easy to get working on a mac https://davidgow.net/handmadepenguin/

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#24

A comment thread from a couple years ago that resonated with me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11087399 I watched about a dozen Handmade Hero episodes, and I was a bit annoyed that every session resulted in a random hunt to fix a bunch of bugs because there was not sufficient abstraction. It wouldn't be so bad if the abstractions were upcoming, but Casey seems to have an aversion to abstraction and I stopped w…

I've gone through the first 20 and don't think you are accurately characterizing them. Maybe 2 or 3 of them involved significant time hunting down a bug.

You would likely still encounter bugs while building the abstractions to not have bugs. It might be neat if you could pick out a particular example and show how your approach would have avoided the problem or be quicker though.

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#25
post #2

This is a brilliant gimmick for promotion, catch the intersection of gamers interested in game design.

You cant fake this- this is heart, soul and spouse sacrificed to teach the world how to make games. I guess if you cant feel that passion for something -it must be kind of scary. I can not throw a basketball into the hoop - and if it would save my life. Now i could downplay all the NBA players, calling it a "nice hobby", a gimick to sell shoes. Or just admit with a nod of acknowledgment- that i will never be this goo…

I’m sorry but this is nuts. The series is excellent but it’s obviously specifically setup to support both working full time and dealing with life as well as recording everyday.

If you want to put a bit of time in everything shown is easily attainable and that’s the point. None of this is cutting edge, it’s basic making games stuff without libraries and a fairly modest goal in terms of the actual game.

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#26

A comment thread from a couple years ago that resonated with me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11087399 I watched about a dozen Handmade Hero episodes, and I was a bit annoyed that every session resulted in a random hunt to fix a bunch of bugs because there was not sufficient abstraction. It wouldn't be so bad if the abstractions were upcoming, but Casey seems to have an aversion to abstraction and I stopped w…

That's the exact point of HM. Abstractions come from the knowledge gained after wrestling with problems, not as a form of premature optimization.

And this is especially true in games because you need to get all abstractions right otherwise the game will be limited and/or not performant enough.

In many other programming fields you don't get punished for adding a few abstractions that are not strictly necessary, so usually other programmers are used to abstracting things away fairly early (eg in OOP: properties vs public variables, ...) because they're free as long as you don't overuse them.

Also you should keep in mind that the stream is educational so Casey sometimes takes the scenic route before getting to the point, and he's both implementing the engine and designing it, so sometimes he doesn't know yet what he wants exactly.

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#27

A comment thread from a couple years ago that resonated with me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11087399 I watched about a dozen Handmade Hero episodes, and I was a bit annoyed that every session resulted in a random hunt to fix a bunch of bugs because there was not sufficient abstraction. It wouldn't be so bad if the abstractions were upcoming, but Casey seems to have an aversion to abstraction and I stopped w…

I've watched roughly 90% of the series to date and I'm happy to report that this "jumping around in a bunch of files trying to figure out what memory write caused an issue at run-time" is infrequent, at best. Occasionally there's a gnarly wild-ponter-esque bug that takes an hour, and very occasionally two, to debug, but the vast majority of the time on the series is spent writing new code and refactoring old systems that need to use some new feature.

I actually find it amazing that sometimes 400 hours of programming and 2 years later he goes back to code written in the first few weeks and is fairly easily able to modify it to work with a new system that's just been implemented.

EDIT: Formatting

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#28
post #2

This is a brilliant gimmick for promotion, catch the intersection of gamers interested in game design.

You cant fake this- this is heart, soul and spouse sacrificed to teach the world how to make games. I guess if you cant feel that passion for something -it must be kind of scary. I can not throw a basketball into the hoop - and if it would save my life. Now i could downplay all the NBA players, calling it a "nice hobby", a gimick to sell shoes. Or just admit with a nod of acknowledgment- that i will never be this goo…

> heart, soul and spouse sacrificed

Spouse? What happened?

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#29

Wow this is crazy; I'm surprised its still going on after all this time. Doesn't seem healthy imo to stick just one project for so long without significant ROI. But yes, commendable indeed, and I hope people got significant value out of it, for his sake.

> Doesn't seem healthy imo to stick just one project for so long without significant ROI.

I don't think he's in it for the money. I think that he, and many game developers of a similar vintage, are frustrated with the direction that modern software has taken. It's slow, getting slower, and often doesn't work correctly. I think this is his way of expressing that frustration, by teaching how the machine you're programming ACTUALLY WORKS. I for one have gotten more out of Handmade Hero than any other single source of learning in my life.

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#30

A comment thread from a couple years ago that resonated with me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11087399 I watched about a dozen Handmade Hero episodes, and I was a bit annoyed that every session resulted in a random hunt to fix a bunch of bugs because there was not sufficient abstraction. It wouldn't be so bad if the abstractions were upcoming, but Casey seems to have an aversion to abstraction and I stopped w…

The entire point is to show him code an entire game in C from scratch without using libraries, for educational reasons. Given that, what would you like to change and why?
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