Holden

I'm skeptical of platforms forcing the "play anywhere" idea in #games. Devs should have some control over how their games are made available. Forcing everything to be available everywhere increases access, but does it take away niche, hand crafted, constrained experiences. And forces work onto devs.

For sure. Love seeing different, creative variations of it.

I'll take a fromsoft style 100ft tall door or mile long bridge please.

The AI trash tidal wave is brewing 😞, so I really hope that either 1. we as a society end up just rejecting and constraining it or 2. it becomes so expensive that it outweighs whatever benefits people are getting from it because at some point the GenAI companies have to actually try to be profitable

The enshitification is on the way

GenAI is like my home repair projects. It looks impressive at a glance, until you get closer to it.

For sure, learn the patterns now, whether you agree with them or not.

But I honestly think if devs learned like that, then shit would be less complicated. We wouldn't be using a lot of enterprise patterns that were just blindly accepted as "the way". We're just overcomplicating most things.

Yes, especially for juniors.

Ok if you're a junior at a company, don't go wild & piss off coworkers if there's an agreed way of writing code.

In personal projects go wild. There are devs with 3 months experience terrified of globals because everyone told them it's bad. Experiment. Try everything.

Ha I did notice that and ya I've used it for the same type of scenario (continue a loop). Another thing that gets a really bad rap but in small simple scenarios is 🤷‍♂️

Might be :D
I've mostly built web stuff too. Definitely not saying to make everything global, but even in huge projects, there are places where some global state can just save you some headache.

Why not Singletons instead? Those are just globals. Don't trick yourself.

Not very testable? There's an extra step of setup for tests, but plenty testable. I'd argue easier than dealing with the annoyance that comes with DI and such. Also I'm wary of letting testability drive how the code works. I've seen some convoluted stuff just to be able to write a mocked test.

Memory allocation? This doesn't seem like a globals problem. This is an allocation scheme problem. Not everything should be global, not everything needs to exist for the lifetime of a program. But for data that does, allocate globals on init, clean up on shutdown.

Shadowing? I've just never had an issue where I shadowed a global variable without knowing it. IDEs, LSPs, some compiler warnings, will catch this.

Namespace issues? Depends on how the language handles scope, but if you are bringing in a bunch of dependencies that also have globals in the same namespace then fair, it's a problem. Not all languages have this issue.

No constraints? That's fine. Everything does not need to be encapsulated and hidden away and wrapped with getter setters. If every time the var changes you really need something else to happen, write a function.

Hard to understand (non-locality)? you know what's harder to understand than a reference to a global? 10 layers of DI and abstraction nonsense.

Wrote my first line of code ~14 years ago, went to school for CS, have worked professionally since 2014, and still really don't understand why global variables are absolutely hated by most #programmers. Outside of concurrency issues or strict FP languages.

Even more than the tutorial. I bang my head against the wall trying to design the game in chronological order beginning to end, but I constantly get stuck. When I ignore that and just build up misc. pieces/mechanics, and then order/rearrange stuff later, I get to a more interesting game faster.

💯

When developing games, I always try to build them in the order that I would play them. That's been a mistake every time and I need to stop it. #gamedev #indiedev

Being able to hold 90% of the language in your head is absolutely why I'm enjoying it. There's not 200 different ways to do a thing, no bloated standard lib. There's a couple of things I'd like to see (like a test runner) but also it wasn't difficult to roll that yourself in 100 lines of code.

Lua is the simplest (in a good way) language I've ever used. You can seriously learn the entire language in an afternoon from the reference. With all my recent #gamedev projects, I'm using Love2D, Lua (Teal), a Makefile, and neovim. And it's the most fun I've had #programming in a long time.

Luck be the landlord creator y'all 👇

They got me. The #nvim bros got to me. I'm becoming one with the terminal for #gamedev #indiedev.

Nominating this for best GH issue ever raised.

Grids on grids.

How often are you writing brainstorming type notes, doodling on paper or some drawing app, mind maps, etc.? I know not the same as a GDD but just curious how much time you spend "planning" compared to just jumping into the game and building.

Those words can mean anything to any one gamer at this point.

Praise the great hoppy one #screenshotsaturday