As long as the next entities that come along use AB in the way that it is defined this isn't a problem. At this point you look at everything and say 'let's take AB out of these two entities and then each one will only handle C and D by itself', which is a logical thing to say, since you abstract out AB and you start reusing it everywhere else. But then comes around another type of entity that does ABD.

At first you just code ABC directly in the entity because there's no reason to do otherwise.

The main problem it creates is that early generalizations are often wrong, and when a generalization is wrong it ossifies the structure of the code around it in a way that is harder to fix and change than if it wasn't there in the first place.Ĭonsider the example of an entity that does ABC. As programmers we're sort of wired to see repetition and want to get rid of it as fast as possible, but I've found that that impulse generally creates more problems than it solves. This is a very very hard thing to do in practice. Most of the soft lessons I've learned have to do with this, so it's important to set this context correctly first.īy far the most important lesson I took out of this game is that whenever there's behavior that needs to be repeated around to multiple types of entities, it's better to default to copypasting it than to abstracting/generalizing it too early. The first two projects failed for various reasons, but in the context of programming they ultimately failed (at least from my perspective) because I tried to be too clever too many times and prematurely generalized things way too much. Two of those projects are dead and failed completely, and the last one I put on hold temporarily to work on this game instead. And then I'll also talk about why I'm gonna write my own engine.įor context, I've been trying to make my own games for about 5-6 years now and I have 3 'serious' projects that I worked on before this one. I'll divide these lessons into soft and hard: soft meaning more software engineering related ideas and guidelines, hard meaning more technical programming stuff. I just released my first game, BYTEPATH, and I thought it would be useful to write down my thoughts on what I learned from making it.

Gideros scene manager events