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Sure, but the biggest reason to direct anybody to these videos is that they should actually make that video game they want to make, not just think about it - an

Sure, but the biggest reason to direct anybody to these videos is that they should actually make that video game they want to make, not just think about it - and so the fact that Handmade Hero just trails off and doesn't end up producing a finished video game is a problem. The craftsmanship is dubious. I think it's a problem that people assume Casey knows what he's doing when so often he's like "We're doing it live" and Casey's hand coded solution is pretty bad whereas the thing which came in the box is very good. Casey understands Casey's version, and that's an upside if you are Casey but you are not. If the result was a finished game then hey, whatever, the game was finished and that matters. But that part didn't happen either, so then it's just like watching Tsoding or something.

ahaferburg 2mo ago
At some point I stopped caring about Handmade Hero because he just never got out of the global illumination rabbit hole. He should have followed that as a side quest, behind a feature flag. Maybe one week for progress on the game, one week for rendering experiments. He didn't seem to make much progress, and it just fizzled out as he ran out of steam. Finishing should have been a bit higher on the priority list. It was just not setting a good example from a project or self management perspective.
guitarlimeo 2mo ago
Well Billy Basso was hugely inspired by the Handmade Hero series and went on to make the critically acclaimed Animal Well because of it. That's enough of a win for that series in my eyes.
- andersonpico 2mo ago
  animal well is such an incredible game and it shows how talented Billy Basso is in multiple disciplines
- tialaramex 2mo ago
  Animal Well is a great game, there's a lot in there and I appreciate it when a game is deep rather than big but I don't see much connection there. Maybe it's like how "Maze: Solve The World's Most Challenging Puzzle" (a book I disliked immensely) inspired Tonda Ros to make "Blue Prince" a game which I enjoyed tremendously.
  - guitarlimeo 2mo ago
    Animal Well wouldn't exist without Handmade Hero, Billy himself said it in an interview. The first game architecture he made was RAII etc and full of spaghetti and then he actually followed Handmade Hero and started to getting somewhere.
    - bena 2mo ago
      To be fair, there's another adage that comes into play here: Build one to throw away, you will anyhow. His second attempt, no matter how he made it, was made with the context of his earlier mistakes. RAII doesn't lead to spaghetti code necessarily. If anything, "unity builds" would more encourage spaghetti as it's easier to reference anything else in your build.
      - tialaramex 2mo ago
        I think the mess you'll get with too much "Handmade" / Casey style ZII is actually slightly worse than if you lean too hard on RAII but it may well be less visible and so you don't notice. For video games you can get things pretty badly wrong on the technical front these days and deliver an excellent game, that's one of the things Blue Prince demonstrates really well, a lot of the guts of Blue Prince are a trash fire, but the player will not ordinarily notice so who cares? Rebecca (of Rebecca's Pixel Quest) noticed, hundreds of hours in, that if she has two of certain special items the game gets confused. That's the sort of bug a better engineer wouldn't have, but she'd been playing the game for over a year when she noticed.
        bena 2mo ago
        Yeah, that's why I can't take game developers too seriously when they harp on overall software quality. They write a specific type of software that is very forgiving of bad architecture. Hell, some games are very forgiving of slow software as well. For example, since we're talking about Muratori, The Witness does not have any of the concerns something as banal as Word has. The Witness gets to run for a single user as the sole application, without regard for anything else, and doesn't persist anything notable to the system. There are entire universes of bugs and issues you just never even have to know exist. Hell, even Call of Duty supports multiplayer, which the Witness does not have to do. Not to mention, sometimes your choice is between good performance or good architecture. Yes, functions cost, abstractions cost, all of this stuff costs. But some applications don't have the luxury of being replaced every Christmas. Some applications never get to "feature complete", they are living entities.

ahaferburg 2mo ago

At some point I stopped caring about Handmade Hero because he just never got out of the global illumination rabbit hole. He should have followed that as a side quest, behind a feature flag. Maybe one week for progress on the game, one week for rendering experiments. He didn't seem to make much progress, and it just fizzled out as he ran out of steam. Finishing should have been a bit higher on the priority list. It was just not setting a good example from a project or self management perspective.

guitarlimeo 2mo ago

Well Billy Basso was hugely inspired by the Handmade Hero series and went on to make the critically acclaimed Animal Well because of it. That's enough of a win for that series in my eyes.

andersonpico 2mo ago
animal well is such an incredible game and it shows how talented Billy Basso is in multiple disciplines
tialaramex 2mo ago
Animal Well is a great game, there's a lot in there and I appreciate it when a game is deep rather than big but I don't see much connection there. Maybe it's like how "Maze: Solve The World's Most Challenging Puzzle" (a book I disliked immensely) inspired Tonda Ros to make "Blue Prince" a game which I enjoyed tremendously.
- guitarlimeo 2mo ago
  Animal Well wouldn't exist without Handmade Hero, Billy himself said it in an interview. The first game architecture he made was RAII etc and full of spaghetti and then he actually followed Handmade Hero and started to getting somewhere.
  - bena 2mo ago
    To be fair, there's another adage that comes into play here: Build one to throw away, you will anyhow. His second attempt, no matter how he made it, was made with the context of his earlier mistakes. RAII doesn't lead to spaghetti code necessarily. If anything, "unity builds" would more encourage spaghetti as it's easier to reference anything else in your build.
    - tialaramex 2mo ago
      I think the mess you'll get with too much "Handmade" / Casey style ZII is actually slightly worse than if you lean too hard on RAII but it may well be less visible and so you don't notice. For video games you can get things pretty badly wrong on the technical front these days and deliver an excellent game, that's one of the things Blue Prince demonstrates really well, a lot of the guts of Blue Prince are a trash fire, but the player will not ordinarily notice so who cares? Rebecca (of Rebecca's Pixel Quest) noticed, hundreds of hours in, that if she has two of certain special items the game gets confused. That's the sort of bug a better engineer wouldn't have, but she'd been playing the game for over a year when she noticed.
      - bena 2mo ago
        Yeah, that's why I can't take game developers too seriously when they harp on overall software quality. They write a specific type of software that is very forgiving of bad architecture. Hell, some games are very forgiving of slow software as well. For example, since we're talking about Muratori, The Witness does not have any of the concerns something as banal as Word has. The Witness gets to run for a single user as the sole application, without regard for anything else, and doesn't persist anything notable to the system. There are entire universes of bugs and issues you just never even have to know exist. Hell, even Call of Duty supports multiplayer, which the Witness does not have to do. Not to mention, sometimes your choice is between good performance or good architecture. Yes, functions cost, abstractions cost, all of this stuff costs. But some applications don't have the luxury of being replaced every Christmas. Some applications never get to "feature complete", they are living entities.