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How To Program Independent Games

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Deozaan:
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:
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:
Yeah. I really liked it.

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