[doty]

From http://number-none.com/blow/blog/programming/2016/07/07/brai...:

The game Braid originally shipped to the world in 2008, and after some ports in 2009, I have only worked significantly with the code on a few occasions. But I want to maintain this game indefinitely into the future; in the back of my mind, there have always been some clean-ups that I have wanted to perform on the code. Often when shipping a game, the best answer to a problem isn’t evident, and we are under time pressure, so we solve the problem in some way that is sufficient but sub-optimal. Other times, we need to design the game to meet technical constraints of systems we want to deploy on, but as the years go on, these systems become irrelevant, so the code can be cleaned up. I figured it would be interesting to talk about some of these things in a blog (and the blog will help motivate me to think about these situations and clean some of them up!)

[unwind]

As a game developer in a semi-previous life, this sounds like such fantastic luxury.

Game code is often (not always, and in larger studios that maybe have their own engines even less so) fire-and-forget.

I'm almost kind of jealous. :)

[jacobolus]

After a few days of working on it, it seems like he’s been able to cut about 25k lines of code from the original ~95k, taking it down to about 70k lines. Pretty nice!

Throwing away never-called functions, chopping out hacks for now-outdated platforms, de-duplicating subsystems, switching to easier-to-reason-about data structures, making assets and related code use more standard formats, etc. must be pretty satisfying, like peeling old faded cracking paint off a wall and refinishing it.

I wonder where he’ll end up.