[mikepurvis]

In what quarters is that narrative? Surely one only has to play Balatro for an hour or two to understand the incredible game design effort that underpins it all, which is brought so vibrantly to life by the music, art, animations, and all the rest of it.

I can't imagine someone appreciating all this and still managing to poo poo it over a few bugs or maybe some quibbles about it having been built in Lua.

[dilDDoS]

People that mention this are usually referring to this chunk of the source code: https://www.reddit.com/r/programminghorror/s/KmEWRILR1q

My assumption is that a lot of the people that look at small chunks of code and judge someone’s programming ability are people who have only worked in corporate environments and have never had to build a large project on their own, and don’t have any understanding of the effort it takes to make a game like Balatro by yourself. Maybe that’s an unfair judgment. But so is calling LocalThunk a “shitty programmer” over some questionable if-else logic.

[slongfield]

People love to dunk on hacky looking gamedev code. Some of it is pretty ugly, e.g, VVVVVV's famous gigantic switch statement, but if it works and makes a fun game, that's the actually important part.

[IsTom]

It's verbose and could be simplified, but also looks like something you write once and never look at again. If it works it makes no sense to spend any more time on it.

[AnIrishDuck]

Yeah, working on a game myself and ... sometimes you just gotta do stuff like that.

Working on a game solo requires juggling several wildly different disciplines at the same time. Sometimes you're in "game designer" mode, you need to fix a bug or add a feature, and you bonk in the caveman thing that obviously works.

Solo gamedev is basically the "startups should accumulate technical debt" meme on steroids. As long as you can understand the code, nobody cares about how it looks. Only how the game plays.