>> Well written code
>> written in perl

Implying code written in Perl can be even well-written.

Anyway, I’m much against “self-documenting code” philosophy (your other points are valid tho!). Why? I’ve read many sources that are supposed to be “self documenting”, but it was still hard job requiring trial and error to even get idea of what code is doing. Easier than if variables are called Variable1, variable2, etc. and functions function1, function2, etc., but still.
NOTHING, I say NOTHING can replace properly placed comments. Even quick description in header of function/procedure that explains what it is supposed to do is good.

You might try a library that mixes C++ and python, like Panda3D. If you’re not doing anything technically fancy, that will probably let you live in python most of the time. (Disclaimer: I haven’t really used Panda3D, so can’t say if it’s the best C++/python lib … it does appear to be used for a number of commercial disney projects, and CMU student projects, though.)

Python is only okay if you know for sure you will never need to make your game run fast. If it ever turns out that you do, then you suddenly have to rewrite the whole thing.

With something like Eve Online, I wouldn’t be surprised if the gameplay code is in Python, but I can almost guarantee you that the renderer and other heavy-duty, performance-critical parts of the game are not.

I would like to hear your opinion on language choice. You sort of defended your choice of c++ to Giuliano Suminsky, and I’m of course aware of the performance advantages, but would you say you need to write in it so you can optimize later on down the road?

Obviously I agree with you and everyone else that c++ is unpleasant, but mostly I just like writing in Python. I’m not married to it, and if I need to switch to a lower level language, I will, but what do you think? And I know Eve Online is mostly in Stackless Python. I’m really more interested in what you think is best for a project more similar in scope to Braid or Terraria.

I would say that architectural decisions are terribly important. A bunch of tools you’ll never use aren’t.

These things are often best learned through refactoring. Just make something work. Then stare at your code. What patterns can be isolated from the monolithic mess?

Otherwise, even with the right architecture, you’ll probably get it wrong or not make anything at all.

Then I learned KISS and YAGNI which made me think again on how important architecture is for my games. It made me remember you from Independent Game The Movie and decided to look up “Jonathan Blow Programming” in google and found this invaluable resource! Thank you again.

“premature optimization is the root of all evil”

of course it was somewhat tongue in cheek but the lecturer basically went on to make similar points as the first 20 minutes of the talk. great stuff, and i never forgot it

it’s unfortunate that this isn’t taught more widely though. now back in grad school, i see professors make this mistake all the time when instructing students how they should code :(

Thanks a lot, I really appreciate your insights! Congrats for Braid too, awsome game.

It is important not to prematurely optimize, but it is also important to be able to optimize, later on, the things that need to go fast. Slower languages / systems / engines prevent you from being able to do that. If you program in those systems from the start, you are locked in, and you are unable to improve the performance of your game later when you need to.

So please don’t be confused about what I am saying here. I am not anti-performance at all. I am saying that performance has its time and place, but that people are usually too worried about it. It is still important; the key is just to realize that most of the effort people put into worrying about efficiency is wasted, because it has negligible impact on the running code.

Dont get me wrong, since when I decided learn programming my focus is c++ and directX , Im one of those who ends up reinventing the wheel ( because I cant accept using things that I dont understand how they work, not because I think I can do better) ..
Lately I get introduced to c# and the difference in productivity is just scary, although I love programming in c++ and use d3d, I dont see much reason on using it for an indie project..I mean, getting stuff done is really what matter, and c++ is a big minus on the field.

So basically, why c++ if you not fanatic about performance? Does even the simplest c++ (“performance careless”) beats c# + unity or c# + XNA, at the point that the productivity of the later doesnt compensate? Was it more of a personal choice?(enjoying the language, more experience with it)..

It got longer than I expected, sorry, Im just really curious about your opinion. You see, I decided to learn programming because of games, and decided to focus on c++ and directX because of games, now all the indies coming in java/c#/unity are making me think about the direction I should take. And since you did REALLY great with the tools I most like, you are my main reference.

I thought Jonathan’s inline code suggestion was a good one, but for different reasons than he outlined. Basically, I would rather have a somewhat long method with the code organized into “paragraphs” than to extract each of those paragraphs into separate methods for no reason other than to reduce one method down to a nifty series of calls. It’s nearly as easy to read/maintain the longer method, and much easier to read the rest of the code if it isn’t polluted by a bunch of little one-off private methods.

If I find myself writing very similar “paragraphs” two or three times in different places, then it’s time to go back and extract a method or even change the object structure. Of course, that’s in the context of a language and IDE that make such refactoring simple – and I’m not writing public-facing APIs where such changes ripple out to other people. I might have to reconsider the approach in a different scenario. Also, some people like to unit test *everything* including private methods. I’m not one of those people, but I would preemptively break things into small, testable chunks if I were.

Anyway, this situation is uncommon (for me, at least) because other design considerations usually limit the size of methods.

Back in the olden days (ah…), people just gravitated towards the ‘best way’ of doing things by refining the way they worked and the methods they used based on a combination of their own ideas, and ideas of others that they encountered… you ended up with 2 types of people:

innovators – made the new methods or ideas, and showed them through demos
subscribers -everyone else… once something was shown to be better, it was adopted

.. that mechanism evolved because it works… but the current status quo – and this is only my opinion – is that people have been allowed to assume the role of ‘innovators’ purely because they a) wrote a paper with a title that caused a high percentage of people to read it, or (worse) they didn’t write the paper, but agree with it, and b) the content of the paper went unchallenged… usually because it is wrapped in some kind of mathematical proof that no-one is either able (or can be bothered) to dispute.

result -> bad dev + programming practices adopted by the students… some of those become teachers, and the cycle repeats.. dont do it!!

If an idea or a new way of doing things is better than the old way, people can generally see the benefits and decide for themselves.. thats how progress is made… but its bothersome to me to see clearly poor methods being taught as the best way to do things, when they have not been universally accepted ‘in the field’ (or even tried!) , and instead only formed and accepted in academia, when by definition those 2 fields are mutually exclusive!

This talk is a real weapon when having to argue with academics, performance nazis and occasionally myself. :D

Also thanks for using the words “acid trip” in your talk. ;)

As a one-man team especially, it is just about doing a good job and not breaking stuff.

Inevitably, yes, some things will break, but often when that happens it is a sign that those things need to be revised to become simpler.

Sometimes, though, breakage is just a fact of life, and I just suck it up and deal with it, fixing these breakages whenever they happen. Yes, it feels bad when things break like this and you don’t notice for a while, but I have never been in a situation where the amount of time spent fixing breakages like this exceeds the amount of time spent writing and running tests. In fact it doesn’t come anywhere close.

I imagine things would be very different for a bigger team, though.

Sorry, I should be less specific and ask about any kind of automation of testing. How do you ensure that you learn about previously working things being broken after making code changes? If you’re a one-man team, it would be difficult to regularly manually test every single thing so I guess it’s just about being diligent?

I have never done unit testing and I don’t find it a very useful concept…

Thanks for the lecture, was really helpful for me.
I’m currently learning computer programing as I would like to be making indie games in my life.
I’m coming to a point where I have to choose which University/College I want to study in for the upcoming years (I live in France). So, I am asking you: do you think that a video games-oriented school is a better choice than a Computer Science-oriented one? Even if, indeed, I know that I won’t probably agree to most of the design techniques I’m gonna study… Which one appear to be the “least worst”?

Thanks for all!

Are you the MySQL book author? I have your books! =D

Yeah, but even within a namespace or file, you have to build a mental understanding of that call graph, and that carries overhead…

By extracting these blocks of code and naming them, we achieve a lot of implicit documentation and achieve a higher-level view. An optimizer will not have difficulty inlining the code.

Thanks for the incredible lecture. Very useful.

I’m from a software engineering background, but have recently moved into another incredibly time-consuming field: animation.

The great news is: all your points about premature optimization also apply to being an independant animator.

Especially the “how many years of my life can I spend on this project” optimization problem, the “only protoype an idea until you work out whether it can go further” and the philosophy to “always work on your best idea”.

I’m in two minds about missing out on the video of The Witness. Maybe I’ll just bite my nails and wait for the official release.

Can’t wait.
–Phil

The stuff at the beginning about what it takes to finish a game was something I hadn’t thought about before, but that also agrees with my experience. I guess it’s no coincidence that when I started to really focus on simplicity is also when I started to finish the games I started.

Keep in mind that interface is different from implementation! If I am using arrays to do stuff, I probably still use a very simple interface where you say, hey, give me the item corresponding to this name, or whatever — just like you would with a hash table. So there’s not any readability difference to speak of, there, when it comes to implementation differences.

But again hash tables are sort-of a red herring. The real issue is, like, I have some struct and I actually want to index it 3 different ways… then multiply that by lots of different data structures in the game.

It seems like someone would be able to write arguably simpler and clearer code by using an actual, let’s say, map with a reasonable interface than it would be to emulate a map with a array just because you wouldn’t have written a map.

Yes, you read that right…

Yet, I am also optimising the “years of my life per program implementation”.

It’s just that my game is quite a bit bigger than other lone amateurs normally attempt:

“METAVERSE”

Early on I realised that I’d never complete something of its scale without bugs in C++ or by using conventional content creation methods. Consequently, I don’t feel the last couple of decades has been a waste of time (although, there were a lot of paradigms like OO and FP to learn in enough depth in order to comprehend the “subtle negatives chained” to their ideas and what, less flashy, but more robust and integrated approaches had been unfairly overshadowed), as I am confident that my language will boost my productivity. Repeatedly. Also, my faith in procedurally-generated content – particularly, thematically consistent emergent narratives – and lack of financial pressures (it is a hobby project without deadline), free me from the majority of burdens you listed on your 9th Slide.

Actually, that’s inaccurate. Neither the R&D or the game design are a burden.

I am enjoying every minute of it – and to think I only started the project to avoid boredom!

Yay, go me!

Cool to hear someone articulate these things so well.

as an aside, it’s interesting to see line count, just as a curiosity. braid was a lot larger than the games i’ve made; but i still work in game maker / gml, which is a higher-level language. immortal defense had only 18k lines, but i made it in 6 months, so that’s 3000 lines a month. it’d be interesting to see line counts for other indie games

But more on topic, awesome presentation.

Actually we did a similar project before, and that was such a super-rushed class project that we dare not look at that code anymore… however, during that period of time we also gained “some” knowledge of various methodologies “to write better programs”, and also we were becoming more comfortable with using some advanced C++ features and programming techniques. So, we ended up devising layers of abstractions and tried to write better quality code (or so we thought) and at some point we felt that the code looked good, really :p

“The second-system effect” just come to my mind. Funny thing is my friend and I both read the Mythical Man-Month even before we did both projects. Well..guess sometimes reading good books is just nowhere near enough when we’re really lack of experience. Maybe we even confused straightforward code with spaghetti code (by thinking that writing everything straightforwardly is bound to be spaghetti in the long run).

Still much to learn. Thank you again. :)

And anyway, 15k lines of code is not really a big enough program that you start running into structural issues. So it probably doesn’t matter that much.

That said, one thing you said stuck out like a sore thumb. The idea of wrapping two objects in a third object just so that the other two objects “can communicate”, that just seems like the kind of severe overabstraction typical to academia and programming books, that only causes problems in real life (in part for exactly the reason you are talking about — any changes in procedure definitions / parameters / etc are now twice as much work to do as they were before). Why don’t you just, you know, let the two objects communicate?

This talk enlightened me a lot. I’ve recently been looking at the code my friends and I written for our game, and thinking about where it got too complicated than it should be, but I wasn’t very sure … and this talk really clarified many things for us.

I’ve got a few question though. You talked about optimizations, data structures, algorithms and generalizations, however what’s your take on “design patterns”? or it’s already covered by “don’t over-generalize things”? It’s like, for instance, should we simply stick to the most basic switch-case for state machines, or should we use a state pattern? (or even use a state machine lib? I guess no.) Or any similar situation like: we know there’s a pattern for this job, and the use of this pattern will make the related code “looks cleaner” and should have more “maintainability”, or have more “semantics” and “more expressive”, and blah blah blah, but it’s bound to be adding a few classes here and there. Thoughts? :)

And there might be a more “architectural” thing. We write our game code in a way that the game model objects never touch any graphic-related code or graphic related object directly, and vice versa, and then we use a composition object to hold the corresponding model and graphic object (so that they can communicate). This certainly made different parts of the code stays pure and don’t look spagetti, but we also find ourselves sometimes have to punch through an additional layer to add a specific functionality. Do you think this is clearly an over-architecture/abstraction?

To add some context, we used an open source graphic engine and we currently have around 15K LoC (code only) and 2 programmers, and it’s our first project over 10K LoC boundary. We sort of only did this in our spare time though, it was never a full-time project.

Thanks in advance!

Excellent talk. Sad to hear the X360 certification process is so arduous; people will go to great lengths for their silly DRM :D.

I’m actually starting a new project on CryEngine 3, with a team I’m a part of, and I absolutely agree with most of the advice about premature optimization and complex algorithms—particularly, I’d add, on difficult-to-debug things like shaders. We actually had quite a few problems with that before; an indie programmer has to choose between productivity and innovation, and it’s a tough balancing act that should always err somewhat on the side of productivity.

One thing I’d also recommend (again from experience) is that the solo programmer use whatever external code is available to him. Even if it doesn’t accomplish exactly what he wants, if it’s satisfactory it will save him a lot of time.

For this project, for example, we have an AI that does some machine learning, and I was very wary of adding new features because this kind of system is not easily debugged. In the end, I opted to use simple neural TD-learning, straight out of the book, and after some reservations decided to do a minimal OpenCL port to boost performance, maybe even hundredfold. But now I’m done. No need to optimize the data structure (just arrays and offsets into arrays for the node connections) since it all fits on a GPU block on the target hardware, and no need to worry about cache efficiency since I’m in the basic habit of writing flat, modular code. Other than that, I’ll see where the bottlenecks are when I actually run it!

And of course I wouldn’t have done the GPGPU port if I hadn’t already been familiar with that platform for some years now.
Especially worth repeating: if you’re an indie, especially a new indie, DO NOT roll your own engine. Just don’t. You think you can do it, but you can’t. We’re using CryEngine 3 SDK when it comes out in August. If you don’t need anything that new, there’s open source stuff you can use.

One of my lecturers put it that way: “Computer Science is not hard science. It consists of half-truths, that have limited appliability dependent on context. ” So yeah, there were some specific examples in the lecture, and a few people found them counter-productive in some cases. Those examples were there to illistrate “Do the simple thing that works good enough. do it fast, and move on. You can refactor later if needed” line of thought rather than presented as absolute truths. Its OK to use stuff like std, boost, and other libraries rather than implement linked lists and trees from scratch. School teaches us rules, so we know when and how to break them. We are taught all the rules just so we will know when and how to break them.

It seems to me, that the biggest obstacle in using simplistic data structures and algorithms as good enough is that optimized, clean and well structured code is, well how should I put it, way easier to mentally masturbate to. For example I really like the alborate data structure I came up for my program to test algorithms form my CS master.

I’m not into game development, but I can do some graphics when I need it. My advice to Kevin: After learning basics of programming learn to use a widget library next. They all use similar concepts, so once you know one, you’ll have easier time learning another if you need it. Stick to language you know. QT is pretty and widely used for C++, Swing for Java. Something like tic-tac-toe or minesweeper made with buttons on a grid layout seems like a good excercise. It won’t be time wasted, you’ll need to know how buttons, menus, labels, etc. work anyway. Plus you’ll be able to make a gui with input fields and “Compute” button for your projects at school rather than pure console interface. After that I’m not sure, I’m not there yet, but learning some SDL and OpenGL (for C++ programmer) seems like the next step.

All this CS and programming talk reminded me of something… CS rap and sheet!!!11

♪♫♪♫♪♫ Code so clean you can eat off it.
If we can’t fix it, it isn’t broken.
Never test for a bug you don’t know how to fix.
I think therefore I create bugs.
Debug is human, de-fix divine.
There’s a bug born every minute, and two to replace him.
The Bugs Of Wrath
There are 2 ways to write bug-free code; only the 3rd way works.
Final message received from the Titanic: Fatal crash due to icebug.
Bugs Bunny was an optimist.
One small bug for man, one great program for mankind.
The bug is mightier than the fix.
Man does not live by bug fixes alone.
For every bug fixed, there is a bigger bug not yet discovered.
The bug stops here.
I have just begun to debug.
Bugs bugs everywhere, and not a fix in sight.
A feature is a bug with seniority.
Human knowledge belongs to the world.
Programmers don’t die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
Debuggers have been made by bug-creators.♪♫♪♫♪♫

Yiah, nigguh! Science FTW! Thanks Jonathan!

Capcha: Spervo Coined ?????

I’ll try not to go into my graduation experience (here in Brazil) and my vision about game dev schools in this comment.

The core idea of the lecture coincide with my line of thinking and gut feeling when coding. For me it’s pretty cool, since I’m not that bright, and what I love about programming is being able to create cool stuff (period).

And it goes without saying that you have to make a good work with your foundation classes, and have a good plan on how to tackle things (without need to formalized the plan too much, though).

About eight months ago I got involved in my first indie game project (with C#/XNA, meh) -pretty simple turn-based management game. And hell, I just had to crunch and simply do stuff work, in a barely robust way. And it felt great, in contrast with the depressive unproductive routine that I had in my previous job.

Also on Life Time Spent metric, Retro City Rampage dev blog have a great entry on building time and productivity, with some practical coding tips. Notch (Minecraft) also made a post on simplicity and not rewriting code unnecessarily , if I remember well. Endorsing Jonathan PoV.

Q: As questioned before I would like to hear Jonathan’s opinion on tools like Unity and their impact in the Life Time Spent Metric. And why he prefer to build stuff from scratch. I’m personally fond of work “from scratch” right now, mainly for educational/career reasons. ’cause it’s not a bad idea to be able to be a tool/tech/lead programmer in the industry.

That’s it.

ps: This blog is getting really, really cool.

Coincidentally I just today got the idea to ask questions about simplicity in programming interviews; I don’t know why I didn’t have the idea earlier.

Kevin: After just 3 programming classes, and if you haven’t been programming on your own, then yeah, I wouldn’t expect you to know how to make a video game. That is just not how it works! I would say just keep taking as many classes as you can (if you are able to — possibly graphics classes!), but also just be sure to do stuff in your spare time, because that is where you *really* learn.

For teaching yourself, yeah, there are a lot of tutorials on the internet. Some are better than others, but if you just pick one and start going with it, you’ll rapidly be getting valuable experience. I don’t have any suggestions of languages to start with, maybe just something you already have exposure to from the classes you have taken.

I want to be able to teach myself some of these things in case I don’t get a chance to take the course. Or if something really inspires me I’ll know that it will be worth my time to take that course. As you said, you don’t need to take a college course to be able to produce good code. When I said I wouldn’t know how to make a game, I didn’t realize when I asked but I thought about it, and graphics is the only thing that would be stopping me from making a very simple game. I really know nothing about graphics.

Thank you for questioning my question to help me be more specific…

Where should I start with teaching myself graphics primarily in the context of video game design? Should I just find some tutorials and just start making simple games and learn by experience? If so any suggestions of programs/languages to start with?

Some thoughts.

I spent nearly 4 years at the university and I barely remember any of it. What I remember the most is what I did during my spare time after class, tinkering with code, looking at open source code and finishing small projects. Considering that I had no programming experience I needed that time at the University. It’s a great place that allows you to explore interests in depth without major life factors getting into the way. So find a state school to look decent, hack when you’re not in class and milk financial aid as much as you can (do not put yourself in crazy debt for this thing). You might be surprised what you can whip up by the time you graduate if you explore hard enough.

The problem is that a lot of folks don’t want to explore that hard. They just want it to be given to them. They’re trying to find the perfect school that will hand them the experience they need. Just get out there and create things, meet people and love what you’re doing. Go create the experience.

Anyway, a few cents worth of thought.

It was quite a shock. I argued with my boss about this philosophy, but their system works, and I don’t know how. It is not a game, BTW, but a system for making web pages with tables connected to a database, and written in perl.

It also aligns somewhat with what I read on extreme programming, tough we used ‘peer review’ of diffs and manual testing rather than unit tests.

To what extent do you value programming innovations within your game design aesthetic? More specifically, do you feel that games that aren’t pushing the envelope on the technical side of things are less likely (though not “guaranteed”) to deliver unique or interesting gameplay?

What I’m ultimately aiming at is your take on the integration of technical programming within the medium of video game design. So I’m not asking if you wouldn’t design a tabletop game or a card game, but, rather, if you feel that the video game medium is inherently dependent on programming & technical innovation.

If at all possible, I’d love to know more about the design and development process behind Braid, as I am currently developing a game for which Braid serves as the primary inspiration.

Any advice would be highly appreciated.

What I took away from the talk is that your main advice is to optimise for development effort as long as it doesn’t violate other constraints. However, the specific tips are somewhat tied to your particular situation: developing code largely from the ground up and using a language like C++. I think this could have been emphasised a bit more clearly. But this is just little gripe, and I really enjoyed the presentation on the whole. Thanks for sharing!

Unconventional games often give a negative first impression. This usually coincides exactly with your tiny window of hype you may be able to generate at launch. Unless you have a ton of good will from a previous product, or a lot of well positioned friends, this can be a recipe for disaster.

We are trying out open development for our project, and letting pre-orderers play around with the current, totally incomplete, builds of the game. This allows us to have a lot more feedback, and to get a core user base used to the main conceits of the gameplay.

Sorry yes, both.

593 files – 85k lines code, 20k lines blank and 15k lines comments.

Lots of systems commented out too.

The other previous few questions I don’t have time to answer right now, it’s going to be a busy day, but I will hopefully get to them a bit later!

First, you wrote all your code from scratch. Why? What do you think of using tools like Unity?

Second, I want to become more proficient at coding, and I have no intention of going to school again. What do you think of this program which is taught online? http://www.gameinstitute.com/courses.php?tab1=foundation

Thanks again!

Loved the talk. I’ll probably watch it again to remind myself of some of these things.

(Not that a good CS program would necessarily say anything specific about games, but it should have you building complex-enough stuff that you could easily see how to make a game of equivalent complexity if you wanted to.)

Is graphics your only question, or is it more fundamental than that?

Does your CS program not have any AI classes? (If not, it is probably not a good CS program! etc…)

Actually, let me turn the question around… what is it about your school’s CS program that makes you think it is pretty good?

I am very glad I watched this video, it cleared up a lot of the worries I had from my CS classes at my university.

I have one question that is fairly broad, but I would be very grateful if I could get some insight.

Using the infinite resources available to me, how do I learn how to make complete software systems?

I go to a school with a pretty good CS program, and have been getting A’s in all of my classes and find myself to be a fairly adept programmer in terms of accomplishing the assignment, but I don’t see how it all fits together. And if I were told to “go make a video game” I would have no idea where in the world to start. I know nothing about objects, all I know is how to make objects and data structures and use standard output to print text out…

How do I use all of the resources around me to learn where to start, how to make graphics, how to tie that into my code, how to make an environment to move around in, how to make AI’s do this and that, etc?

If my question is too vague just let me know and I’ll try to make my question more direct…

A few years ago when I decided that academia wasn’t going to be my path to game development I turned to the internet to learn how to make games. This started out as just working on mods for the Source engine, and reading what documentation I could find in forums and wikis. Over the years, as I moved from Source to the Torque engine and eventually the Unity engine, I’ve always been able to find the information I’ve needed either to solve specific problems, or to expand upon the theories that I’ve been exposed to.

Now I’m coding complicated strategy AIs in Unity without any formal education. I think you’re very right that it’s in the end more about what a person makes of their circumstances than the circumstances themselves and that the advent of the internet has given self-motivated people (who are usually are the ones succeeding at school and in the industry anyway) to acquire as much and as many kinds of information as they need. My circumstance of not having a proper cs education allowed me to forgo all of the “academic standards” of coding and forced me to think about code in as simple and subtractive a manner as I could, because I didn’t have the internal knowledge-base to construct overly complicated code.

Additionally, I think that the arrival of all of these game engines that are cheap to license (Unity Pro costs $1500 per developer seat, and a free license also exists) adds to the ease of learning and working outside of academia, especially because you can start working without having to spend years learning about and developing proprietary engine technology.

I’m not a good programmer by any traditional standards, but I like to think that I’ve managed to optimize both my life and my development process by approaching code in this way and with these tools. Thanks for sharing your ideas and helping me to be more comfortable with this development lifestyle.

Regarding the “premature optimization is the root of all evil” advice I found that it’s a good approach to write straight forward (often bruteforce) code and use a profiler every now and then to identify the worst bottle-necks then optimize these specific parts of the code. The difficulty is in maintaining a project where this refactoring is easily possible and where the refactored code is not only faster (thus eliminating the bottleneck) but also in harmony with the rest of the project so that maintainability isn’t hurt. You have to constantly make decisions (e.g. between straight forward “to the point solutions” and a generalized, loose coupled architecture) and just because something seems a good idea now it might still hurt the project in the long run. This might sound unprofessional but I think a good programmer develops some kind of intuition to help him answer these question. It’s really hard to formalize… and probably something you’ll never master completely.

I really liked the idea of optimizing for saving life time. When considering that point two things seem to be important that I used to undervalue: The build-times of the software and the workflow/asset pipeline. If you’ve ever worked on a project with long build times you know how much that can hurt your productivity and it takes care early in the project to avoid build times exploding later. The same is true for getting content into your game. If the tool chain is bad you can waste a lot of time just exporting, packaging, merging, loading and other things that involve waiting for a progress bar to fill up. As a game developer I become increasingly interested in software that aids the creation-process of the game as opposed to actual game code.

For indie games where we can’t throw a million man-hours at a project but at the same time have to compete with other products that might have had more resources to spend I’d like to suggest another target to optimize for. Wow-factor! :)

Optimizing the level loading code in Doom does not increase the Wow-factor but identifying the one thing that could make your product special might be worth all the optimization you can spend on it. That’s one reason why I found myself to work a lot with Flash in my spare time. Because with Flash there are limitting factors other then my time budget. That’s why the guys in the Demo scene chose to work under artificial constraints (usually size constraints of the executable) because it’s not only *fun* but also educational (right word?) to have to optimize things beyond the naive approach.

My last hobby game project was a retro style flash game. I pixeled the graphics myself (so they are quite bad) did the level design (bad) and story (english is not my first language – bad) and it’s tile based and I used creative commons music and some beep-sounds. Why bother making it? What makes it unique and worth my development time and the time of players? The gameplay idea I wanted to explore involved light and shadow and so I’ve spend about half the coding time on getting dynamic light and shadow into the pixel graphics game. I think it was worth it. That visual combination is something fresh and hard to copy and it got some people pretty excited. It’s what makes the game unique. (Have a quick look: http://runehunt.pixelpracht.net/) One great feature is enough to set you appart from the crowd which doesn’t mean that it makes a great game just not a complete failure.^^

Gabe’s talk about educational games is interesting and I agree with him in general (at least from what I can tell from the liveblog-type notes!)

The thing about learning modeling and animation at school is that there isn’t anything deep here. They are just going to teach you how to operate modeling software, which is fine, but this is also something you can learn yourself by experimenting and going to web sites on the internet. Most of what makes people good modelers and animators is about their fundamental art skills, which that class probably isn’t going to teach. Computer science, though, is a very deep subject and there’s a lot of wisdom involved there, which is why it makes sense to learn that in a school (because the internet is actually kind of a garbage source when it comes to CS — there is just *so* much bad advice out there, vastly outweighing the good advice, and if you are just learning, how are you supposed to be able to tell the difference between what is good and what is bad?)

The recaptcha is just to prevent the huge amount of spam that we tend to get, to cut down on how much maintenance this blog takes (so we can work on the game instead!) It is a little bit inconvenient for users, probably, but hopefully it won’t ask you more than once after it’s installed? (It is not asking me…)

Definitely there are contradictions all over the place; there just isn’t any hard-and-fast rule that one follows 100% of the time. Sometimes a generalized system really is the right thing, sometimes a handful of specific systems are the right thing. But the reason I slanted the lecture in the way I did was to directly counter the overzealousness toward certain ideals that tends to be taught in school (always generalize, etc, etc).

I personally don’t have a fear of shipping because I myself am a harsher critic than just about anyone I know. So if I think the game is good, well, that is good enough for me. (Certainly other people can disagree, but then usually it’s because the things they think are interesting / good are very different from the things I think are interesting / good). And also, lately, especially on this new game, I am sort of moving away from a good/bad spectrum and more toward the idea of just whether this game acts as a lens or as a tribute to a certain part of the universe, in the way I would like it to; and this is quite far removed from the idea of “is this a good or bad entertainment product?” I find it’s pretty easy for me to see whether a game is acting as a lens in that way, and as long as it is doing that, I am okay with it…

Thank you for sharing the lecture with us, it will come in handy and make my life much easier.

Totilo made a nice live blog thing with Gabe Newell talking about games for education and training, its also a very excellent lecture.
http://kotaku.com/5814405/liveblogging-whatever-smart-stuff-gabe-newell-has-to-say-today

i just graduate from high school the 2nd of June nad there are two programs at the community college that i will go to: game development and computer science. I was thinking it was better to go for the CS program but in that program there is no modeling, animating or engine work with real time graphics and i consider that important as well. i don’t know if i will learn other aspects of game development if i just go to CS, I don’t think it has any hands on with modeling and animation… but i would need that right? so what do i do im going to college. just drop the animation and and game developing for straight-up CS only?

…also, did you notice how there is capcha now in the site? idk if its just for me b/c i tend to comment a lot, but there is a ReCapcha thingy under the “leave a reply” section of the article. What’s up with that?

Capcha: Lunch Toperig ???????

Anyway, moving onto the question; I’m working currently on my second personal game project, but I’m frustrated at the limited amount of time I get to actually progress with it, what with having a full-time job as a web developer.

For my own interest, I was wondering what your early game dev days were like. Were you working a “proper” job during the day to pay the rent, while chipping away at your games in the spare time? Or did you go all out on games from day one and manage to get enough back to finance the next one?

Firstly, I agree with you on deleting code and preferring hard coded (to over abstract) systems, but do you see the contradiction that can occur between the two? I sometimes find myself in the position where I could get rid of 2-3 systems by creating 1 generalised one. My preferred option is not to delete here. Wonderfully abstracted systems have got into trouble many times over the years.

Secondly, have you ever suffered from the fear of shipping? I’m now over 3 years in to my game (121,619 lines) and whilst I have that burning desire to get it into the hands of as many players as possible I’m often paralysed by the fear of what people will think. Is it just me that suffers from this resistance and how can it be fought?

Anyway, great talk.

(I’m also depressed that the Witness preview was audio only :p, but it’s probably best not to follow it too closely so I can really enjoy it when it is released)

http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

Of course that is an extreme case, but a lot of stuff that happens at bad American schools reminds me of this (though in different ways that are subtle and that I find difficult to describe fully…)

However, I have no idea how good of a computer science school UCF is. If it’s a good school, cool. If it’s a bad school, do you really want to go there for 4 years?

Part of what I was trying to get at with my earlier posting is… back when universities were invented, the world was fundamentally different. If you didn’t know something, there was usually no way to actually find out about it unless you went somewhere and studied with people who knew it. Now due to the internet that is different, so the role of universities will have to change. Going to a mediocre school back even as recently as the 1980s-1990s could still be a good idea, because it was the best way to find out about things. Now that is no longer the case. So I think as we go into the future, the utility of mediocre schools will go down (but good schools will probably still have high utility)… especially once outfits like the Khan Academy become more-pervasive.

I am not saying UCF is mediocre; I don’t know anything about it, it might be great. But I am just saying that, this being a big influence on the future course of your life, it deserves more consideration than “I am going to a 4-year university because that is what I am supposed to do in life at this point, and I am restricted to Florida for state financial aid reasons” or whatever.

Still no word on the video, eh?

Keep in mind though that there are very few XNA games released on the 360 under this cert process (almost all are XBLIG games, which do not go through certification). I know that The Dishwasher games on XBLA are XNA, and there may be a few others, but really almost all games use the native API.

As for what to learn, I don’t know… if you are able to make pretty good games in a higher-level language, but are having problems getting the performance you need, then maybe. If you are not at that point then maybe there is no good reason?

Would you recommend i should simply learn C++ once and for all (which i have been avoiding for years, judging it too low-level for my tastes…) ?

It looks like one of these newly-thrown-together programs made by a committee that doesn’t understand anything about what the real goals are.

Keep in mind what’s going on academically: now that some schools have established good game design programs, they have seen admissions to those programs skyrocket because a lot of people want to learn how to make video games. So now there is a wave of “me too” schools who want to boost admissions / keep relevancy of certain departments that seemed to be in decline. How do they do this? By saying they have a game design program, just like some other school.

You don’t want to go to a “me too” school, you want to go to a place where there are people who actually know some things. I don’t follow video game schools very closely, but I have a positive impression of the NYU Game Center and of the stuff that USC does. Valve also says they tend to be pretty happy with people they have hired from Digipen (though keep in mind they are saying this about hiring a select minority of people from there).

I myself went to UC Berkeley for computer science (there was no such thing as a video game major or minor at that time, and a serious school would never have been able to establish such a silly thing)… and then I dropped out before getting a degree. It was very good for me to go there and learn the things I learned, but I also spent too long there. Anyway, after that, I was able to leave school and go make video games just fine (at the hardest possible time to go try and do this in the entire history of video games). So yeah, if you just go to a good school for computer science, that is still maybe the best option.

If you are not familiar with the “education bubble” argument, be aware that some prominent people are thinking that the cost of education is now high enough, and opportunities to learn outside of school now rich enough, that going to college is a net lose (financially and in terms of life skills) and that you may well be better off just finding really smart people to learn from in the real world and going and doing those things. Peter Thiel went so far as to offer a bunch of $100,000 fellowships for people to go do creative things instead of amassing debt in school: http://huff.to/mFKEvx

Keep in mind that even if you go to a potentially good school, it is only really what you make it: it can be a good school or a bad school based on what you do there. For the minority of people who come out of Digipen or wherever and are really good and creative game programmers, perhaps many of them would have become just as good if working on their own just trying to make things, using the Internet as a reference. It’s hard to say!

ITT’s program focused on game design theory (which is important) and project management, and lacked programming classes or game-art classes, also there were about 4 classes that were redundant. It wasn’t worth it.

Frankly, I only see 2 programming classes in that BA. Unless you’re going to teach yourself programming, you won’t come out of that degree knowing how to make games.