3 ms·

> Also many tutorials and examples are too toyish and are missing practical concerns like cross controller compatibility, and other real world concerns. Don't

> Also many tutorials and examples are too toyish and are missing practical concerns like cross controller compatibility, and other real world concerns. Don't worry about "real world concerns" until you have stuff that works at all. You're not building a winning product on your first try. > I'd really like a resource that's very opinionated and pragmatic for independent game development. Sounds like you're finding a lot of very opinionated resources. :) However, there is no one "pragmatic" resource in game development. The pragmatic solutions are scattered about. Not to mention that, as you are already aware, there are lots of ways to do things. You just have to pick one and run with it.

stuckinhell 5y ago
Just to clarify, I have stuff that works, but not in a rigorous software engineering kinda of way. Yes, I'm finding lots of opinionated resources, but not informed opinions from experienced game developers/software engineers. Instead I'm getting lots of non expert, new to game dev, or new to programming opinions. When I follow them, I immediately run into an issue, that requires extremely in-depth thinking and usually a different architecture. It all just feels half-baked. Though I suspect I'm heavily spoiled by the fantastic salesforce learning ecosystem.
- hedgewitch 5y ago
  Yeah, that's the thing - the people who do have the experience largely either don't share (heavily introverted/low social presence overall, takes too much time to write blog posts, open source various efforts with poor documentation) or can't share (proprietary knowledge). Most of what you're going to find is low quality. The reality is that, if they're not career programmers who have spent x amount of years at a AAA developer, the code is probably bad. Even if they have, there's a chance that the code is bad. Most of what you're going to find is definitely of the "if it works, we're done" variety (part of this has to do with the time and effort that it takes to make games in general). If you want "rigorous software engineering," you really have to look at formerly commercial (or even still commercial) games that have been open-sourced and try and figure things out from there. Good learning materials are just hard to find. That's why I said just build stuff. You build it, you apply whatever optimizations to the structure or code itself, and you learn good practices through experience.

stuckinhell 5y ago

Just to clarify, I have stuff that works, but not in a rigorous software engineering kinda of way. Yes, I'm finding lots of opinionated resources, but not informed opinions from experienced game developers/software engineers. Instead I'm getting lots of non expert, new to game dev, or new to programming opinions. When I follow them, I immediately run into an issue, that requires extremely in-depth thinking and usually a different architecture. It all just feels half-baked. Though I suspect I'm heavily spoiled by the fantastic salesforce learning ecosystem.

hedgewitch 5y ago
Yeah, that's the thing - the people who do have the experience largely either don't share (heavily introverted/low social presence overall, takes too much time to write blog posts, open source various efforts with poor documentation) or can't share (proprietary knowledge). Most of what you're going to find is low quality. The reality is that, if they're not career programmers who have spent x amount of years at a AAA developer, the code is probably bad. Even if they have, there's a chance that the code is bad. Most of what you're going to find is definitely of the "if it works, we're done" variety (part of this has to do with the time and effort that it takes to make games in general). If you want "rigorous software engineering," you really have to look at formerly commercial (or even still commercial) games that have been open-sourced and try and figure things out from there. Good learning materials are just hard to find. That's why I said just build stuff. You build it, you apply whatever optimizations to the structure or code itself, and you learn good practices through experience.