Working on games is cool cause they're antithetical to clean code. I'm sure some people will argue but clean code relies on systems that obey a set of distinct rules. Those rules are almost always absolute
So you start your game with your clean rules. In context A you can do B but not C
But an unfortunate part of game design is that the most interesting powers you can give players are the ones that break the inherent rules of the system. So inevitably you'll wind up with a bunch of code that works around your baseline rules and that always turns into a goddamn mess
@eniko#gamedev that's why you usually want to design the maximum freedom you're gonna give the player first, and then add the caps that make it into the starting set
@eniko I'll argue, but only from the point of view that software development is all about getting a fixed stack of tech to solve a problem; while game development has you inherently need to CREATE that problem to begin with (paraphrasing @ash on that one)
The real issue comes when you keep changing the problem you're trying to solve. Designers are welcome to say that they can't tell what will be right until they see it, and I'm welcome to say that I need to rewrite the answer if they're going to fundamentally change the question.
It requires a really, really high level approach to programming and project management and a certainty of faith in the vision of a game design to cleanly develop a game from scratch with clean code
@eniko I took me decades of gamedev to realise that the special cases and exceptions aren't imperfections, they're the interesting bits.
My programmer brain always wants to take them out or fold them into a general purpose always-on system, and whenever I do the game gets just a little bit more bland.
@eniko
A bit offtopic, but when the "clean code™" criticisms exploded on my feed I thought that devs were complaining about the broad concept of "cleaner code", only much more later I discovered it was about a book 😅.
@eniko yep. I think it's even more critical to comment your code than in other fields to indicate the intended behavior. It's so easy to accumulate side effects and forget what the original code was intended to do!
@eniko Yeah I can see the dividing line in Procyon's code where "these systems are nicely built, yay" turned into "fuck it I just need to ship this stupid game"
@eniko the good part ist, since you enforced your clean code rules, you can spot the obvious breaks a specific rule does and if they don't take overhand are managable.
@eniko i've come to feel that a critical skill with game programming is being able to roll with design changes and keep things as tidy and maintainable as possible while avoiding both total chaos and total rigidity. every game codebase is a set of compromises in this space and some definitely have way more to admire in than others.
@eniko I personally think some of the cleanest code you can do for this often leads to the most interesting bugs.
Specifically, the latest two Zelda games while I don't know their code are clearly state machine based with rules that situationally turn on and off rule sets. However, you can sometimes turn on two rulesets at once, or turn off one that wasn't meant to be disabled, or cause something to reach a state where the developers chose not to crash the game.
@eniko Yeah, there's no clear specification. Games are perpetual prototypes, and then they ship.
There's some benefits to clean-ish coding in so far as it makes things easier to throw out and replace. It doesn't help maintain a specification, though, because there probably isn't one.
@eniko with games, I started to favor easy to refactor (software) designs, so I don't care if code is a mess as long as it makes it easy to do the inevitable constant refactors
@eniko I try to keep it clean by abstracting everything every time I have work around baseline rules.
In context A you can do B but not C.
Someone fudges context A, now A is a function and still in context A you can do B but not C. But A, B, and C are not hundreds of lines long and have their own A, B, and C's, and so on and so on and oh no oh god no what have I done?
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