Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jordand 67 days ago
There's numerous studios across the games industry that have high coding standards, mandatory code reviews, and expect upskilling. Game complexity keeps increasing, and live service games in particular need to be stable and well maintained and very well engineered in the first place. For many games, the days of games being pressed to disk, shipped out and done with (where bad code is fine) are long gone.
2 comments
rawbot 65 days ago
They aren't long gone. There's a ton of very successful indie or AA games with shoddy development practices: https://www.reddit.com/r/programminghorror/comments/e0bub9/t...

A game isn't a fundamental or structural part of a system. In the end, it is just a game. The goal of a game is to deliver an experience. It doesn't need to be scalable or robust. If the experience isn't marred by bad coding or bugs, then it can still be a great game.

link
jordand 65 days ago
Yeah all of that is always going to be true across hobbyists, indies and small studios. But for commercial game development at scale, where there's multiple studios or outsourcers/co-devs brought on, there's real expectations that people can be on-boarded quickly and work productively on projects with tight schedules. A poor quality, fragile codebase (usually with technical debt) is a recipe for disaster when things are at being worked on at that level.
link
hannahstrawbrry 65 days ago
I think it's odd to say that pressing to disk was more permissive of bad code. Releases like Cyberpunk suggest the opposite- that development teams selling games that can be updated take that into account as they plan and release, and the quality suffers upon launch for it.
link
jordand 65 days ago
Yeah I understand what you mean. For bad code in that sense, I'm mainly thinking back to games work colleagues have worked on (in the era when patching wasn't possible) where horrible one-time hacks and weird workarounds get quickly thrown into a codebase under deadlines and crunch just to get things fixed, platform certified, and shipped. Games in the past were more often using in-house/proprietary engines too where this would happen too under pressure. With patching ubiquitous, QA still have a really difficult job especially with nearly every release being multi-platform.
link