I've a hot take: Use of hacky code in gamedev gets romanticized too much!

[yurisizov@mastodon.gamedev.place]

I've a hot take: Use of hacky code in gamedev gets romanticized too much!

Every larger codebase, for sure, ends up needing some patchwork and creative reuse, at some point, to go against the grain. But some devs forget they can also stop and think for a sec, because games are "supposed to" be messy.

This isn't an argument against experimentation! That's ought to be hacky and disorganized. But then, try to do it properly when you do it for real. That'll save your ass in future, larger projects.

[memoriesin8bit@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@yurisizov 100%!

My first solo game was a simple SHMUP and cause I kept the code base clean (albeit redundant because I didn't understand classes), it was easy and simple to get back to and refactor.

My current game is a LOT more complex and I regularly clean up after a refactor because the complexity makes it hard enough to understand as it is - even without messy blocks.

[alextecplayz@techhub.social]

@yurisizov pretty much, it's fine to have a base you can build on and then return to it later to refine it as you start to flesh out your game.

One of the reasons my game has been delayed since 2024 (besides full-time work) and then I moved it to Godot from Unreal is that neither engine seemed to do what I wanted, until I realized I may have been looking at it the wrong way. The last two weeks I took a step back, wrote a few hacky implementations of a tilemap using various methods (GridMap, TileMapLayer2Ds rendered in 3D via viewport textures, even tried RenderServer), but then I realized that instead of trying to build a tilemap from the ground up by creating quads for each tile, I should instead have one system that can handle both cutting out tiles from a quad and also merging new tiles into it.

This cut my primitive number from hundreds of thousands to like a few thousands as you start creating random holes on 11 different floors, and it works very well on mobile, which is my "baseline" for performance.

[smohc_stahc@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@yurisizov An old teaching story: Two Students use a method for solving an equation the teacher did not talk about. One got full marks the other got none. Each student was asked, before the final grade, how to complete the asssignment as instructed. The one who passed could show both methods.