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It is a valid comparison, because what he made is essentially the same game. And I said that in response to the guess that maybe the 62,000 lines of code was a
by hannasanarion 8y ago
It is a valid comparison, because what he made is essentially the same game.
And I said that in response to the guess that maybe the 62,000 lines of code was all game logic, which is absurd.
Game logic, like, "when the player presses the fire button, spawn a missile" and "this enemy goes up 5 units, then goes down 5 units, then repeats". That's not the kind of thing that will change much from one metroid clone to another, regardless of what technology is used to make them. It is practically always the smallest part of the final product. And to have the game logic's source be bigger than the entirety of an almost identical game, with handcrafted levels, art, and engine included? It's absolutely absurd.
It was in service of the point above: that code is probably all the engine, which means that, yes, it probably was a waste of time, since engines made by professionals are available for free. At best, it's a line on a resume.
- gmueckl 8y ago> It is practically always the smallest part of the final product. What do you base this statement on? There are several classes of games where this is definitely not true.
- hannasanarion 8y agoIn what class of game?
- gmueckl 8y agoAdventures and RPGs are the most obvious ones. There, the story-based interactions quickly turn into tons of game logic corner cases that must be handled. Also, the rule sets for RPG character stats and fighting interactions (strengths, weaknesses, immunities, temporary effects, combos...) generally are pretty insane. Oh, and lest we forget: game logic does not stop once you figured out at a high level that X has to happen. It still needs to set up and drive all the presentation that goes with it on top of the pure bookkeeping. The subtleties of this can be really amazing. To just name some trivial things that come to my mind: doors and elevators should stop when players stand in the way, players and objects should move with the platforms they're standing on (harder than it looks, esp. in 3D), enemies can't just be deleted from memory when their health goes below 0 (but their hitboxes might still go away immediately) and so on.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> It still needs to set up and drive all the presentation that goes with it on top of the pure bookkeeping. Yup, a lot of "game logic" is in fact bookkeeping, i.e. self-inflicted complexity. It's not necessary, but is what happens when you overdo it (though IMO it's more often a symptom of using more frameworks and libraries than less).