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by spiffyk
105 days ago
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I think the biggest mistake you can make is shifting your mindset from making a game to making a game engine. No, you still want to be dead set on making your game, you just don't have the ready-made building blocks from an off-the-shelf engine, so you have to make your own as you go, and only as needed. Personally, when I was working on my little game, I found it helpful to call the endeavour—just like Noel Berry in TFA—"making a game without an engine", rather than "making a custom game engine". I only really wrote the absolutely necessary plumbing that I needed for the game I was making, nothing more. The same goes for software libraries in general, I think. Just make your program. Don't make an overly general library for something you won't need anyway. If the code proves useful for reuse, just factor it out after the fact and generalize as needed. EDIT: Typos, wording |
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This reminds me of when someone makes his own static site generator, write one blog post about how he started a blog with his own static site generator, and then post nothing afterwards.
I suspect the reason for this genre of behavior is there is just a tremendous amount of creativity required to come up with anything original enough to justify putting into a game, or a blog, but game engines and static site generators have relatively straightforward feature requirements that you can just implement like any software feature. Building your own game engine or static site generator is just a good way to procrastinate doing the hard part of game making or blogging while still keeping yourself in the game making or blogging zone so that you can tell yourself, yes, I am a game developer or blogger.