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Author Topic: How To Program Independent Games  (Read 4453 times)

Deozaan

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How To Program Independent Games
« on: June 24, 2011, 05:14 PM »
Jonathan Blow, perhaps best known for making Braid, gives an interesting talk on programming.

http://the-witness.net/news/?p=1004

To me, an inexperienced programmer, the things he said generally make a lot of sense but I hadn't realized them before. I think these things can be applied to programming in general and not just to making games.

A few interesting points he makes:

  • Optimization is usually bad.
  • Using the right data structure(s) is about optimization, therefore it is usually bad.
  • One parameter/metric which people generally forget to take into consideration when thinking of optimization is the limited resource known as time. i.e. minimizing the amount of your life you spend implementing a feature or working on a project is more important than saving a few CPU cycles.

kyrathaba

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Re: How To Program Independent Games
« Reply #1 on: August 03, 2011, 05:10 PM »
Listened to this today.  Good stuff.  Brings home that old homily that there's the textbook method, then there's the real-world way of doing something.

Deozaan

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Re: How To Program Independent Games
« Reply #2 on: August 03, 2011, 07:00 PM »
Yeah. I really liked it.