> but I suspect any high-performance game requires an equivalent level of getting deep down into the code and having a critical understanding of your structure

> but I suspect any high-performance game requires an equivalent level of getting deep down into the code and having a critical understanding of your structures, algorithms, and how your computer primitives fundamentally work and interact. I don't think most indie devs developing games are making "high-performance games". Rather they're spending most of their time in the "business logic" of the game, since most optimizations will have been handled by the engine (I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing either!). I definitely feel that I learned more about data structures, algorithms, and performance optimization outside of the game dev world than in it.