4 ms·
I used to do this defensively when submitting 8-bit games for publication back in the 80s. The non-gamers at the publishing company seemed to feel they had to
by scott-smith_us 8y ago
I used to do this defensively when submitting 8-bit games for publication back in the 80s.
The non-gamers at the publishing company seemed to feel they had to get back to you with a handful of changes. If your game was really polished, the changes would be pointless or even harmful things. I quickly learned to leave in a few obvious things that were trivial fixes, e.g. blocky bitmaps, misspellings, jarring colors.
Instead of coming back with:
> we really like the game, but couldn't the snake be an F-15 fighter, and couldn't the scrolling be vertical instead of horizontal?
...it would be more like:
> Change that color, fix that icon, correct that spelling
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- makapuf 8y agoSee also the story of the duck and the queen on game battle chess https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Chess https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Chess
- icc97 8y agoThe source of that is from a codinghorror post [0] [0]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/
- yebyen 8y agoCame here to say this! I've told this parable of the duck before, but I did not know the origin of the story... "get that duck out of there please otherwise looks OK"
- shoo 8y agosimilarly, in the context of nightmarish optimisation death marches to fit inside a memory budget -- see "the programming anti-hero" https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tricks.php?print=1 https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tri...