Abstract
Good code is felt but never seen. Its impact permeates the whole game in both the audio and visuals. Unless you’re writing a game for a university project, you might think that your code—as in the quality of your code—is unlikely to come under much scrutiny once it’s working. That, alas, is a fallacious argument.
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Notes
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The first day of release requires the player to download a 100MB (or larger) update to the game they’ve just bought. This increasingly worrying trend is increasingly frustrating for all players. Eliminating this ensures that the first thing in your game review won’t be a complaint about downloads!
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These applications are typically installed under Unix-like operating systems, while art tools are generally developed first for Windows. This alone necessitates a little configuration creativity.
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Mine is called devlib and contains known good versions of Fmod, OpenGL, Freetype, and so on, which were approved by the team and shown to work with our game.
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At the risk of sounding like an advertisement, my first book, Cross-Platform Game Programming (Charles River Media, 2005), covers this area fully.
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Writing this line brings back (bad) memories of a bug that occurred only on the GameCube, but not the PC, many, many, years ago!
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Germany is the most common example.
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The Gem Puzzle (a.k.a. the 15-puzzle) is a deceptively simple puzzle that can be rendered impossible by transposing two pieces.
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Mantis, Sifter, Lighthouse, 16bugs, Jira, etc. (Google is your friend)
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Called a change set, funnily enough.
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Also known as trunk-based or mainline development.
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An empty array is typically better, since it prevents the calling code from needing to explicitly test for NULL as a standard enumerator will handle the case normally.
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You might also want to search on the terms peer review and code inspection.
- 18.
Lawrence G. Votta, Jr., “Does every inspection need a meeting?,” Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, p.107-114, December 8–10, 1993, Los Angeles, CA.
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© 2016 Steven Goodwin
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Goodwin, S. (2016). Coding Practices. In: Polished Game Development. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-2122-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-2122-8_9
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