Comment by taeric
9 months ago
Oh my, this has to be my favorite quote in a blog in a long long time.
"... many if not most of the problems don't go away if one isn't willing to constantly refactor their code and treat programming as a puzzle solving process, rather than just a tool to get things done."
I have thought it was just me for a long time, but many of the popular styles of programming that we push definitely seem to require constant refactors in the pursuit of a solution. And I definitely see more tire spinning for the sake of the build than I do for whatever it was folks were building.
Great quote.
It is a great quote!
I think multiple refactors in pursuit of a solution can be a good thing. As your thinking/design evolves, so does the shape of the solution.
The main problem, I think, is that this goes against specifically gamedev. In gamedev whether the solution is the best or more resilient is secondary to extremely fast iteration and delivering something. Like the author says, sometimes "clunky but good enough for now" is what you need to get it over with (for the moment) an iterate rapidly over the gameplay elements you should spend most of your time on. Gameplay, not correctness or reliability or maintainability, is the most important thing in a game.