

Are Game Developers 15 Years Behind The Rest of Us? - christo_
http://blog.chromosundrift.com/2011/04/are-game-developers-15-years-behind.html

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benologist
Interesting read.

As an indie game developer I am _very_ lax with my code, do only human-testing
on it, and eventually don't really care how ugly it gets under the hood
because the code is almost always single-use. I fix bugs that surface in the
first days and then every now and then I put in whatever companies' branding
when I sell licenses.

The games I and other indie developers make and especially on the casual side
just aren't long term investments, we produce them at a blazing rate, make our
money or not, and move on.

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christo_
That's interesting. Do you see games with longer lifetimes being a thing that
the MMO persistent world game categories are causing to change?

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benologist
I think social and virtual goods are _probably_ a wider cause for change but
then the line between MMO and them is pretty blurry (if it even exists)
anyway.

Success is another catalyst ... Tapulous's Tap Tap Revenge probably had
horrible code until it turned out they were going to be working with it for a
long time.

~~~
christo_
Success is a good point.

I suppose there can be many reasons for the code to live longer.

Managing legacy code can be great for encouraging automated testing!

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frou_dh
Insightful article.

My first job was working on an "AAA" game for several years and I never had a
single code review or wrote a single test.

Progress was slow, but everything worked by the time it had to be delivered. I
think slotting in to that lack of discipline and perpetuating it was quite
harmful to my continuing mindset.

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christo_
Do you see this changing?

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frou_dh
I think another thing that perhaps affects games more is having zero knowledge
of other studios' development approaches unless you or a buddy go and work
there. I'm clueless about where the industry is as a whole.

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dpcan
As an indie game developer, I kind of agree with a lot of this article (except
I do backup)

When writing a game, I feel like I'm painting a picture, not writing a
program. New funcionality is like a sweeping brush stroke. It doesn't have to
be perfect, it has to feel right.

