Comment by skeeter2020
5 hours ago
I'd be careful extending learnings from games (solo or team efforts) to general programming as the needs and intent seem to be so different. We rarely see much code re-use in games outside of core, special-purpose buy largely isolated components and assets. Outside of games there's a much bigger emphasis on the data IME, and performance is often a nice-to-have.
It's been mixed moving to normal code: I haven't had to low-level optimise for ages now (man I miss that). But performance in the O() sense has been the same.
Game engine development is very much about processing of data. The pipeline is long and the tree is wide. Being able to reason about complicated data processing topologies mapped very easily across.
Yeah - A game is (generally) a one and done enterprise. Like a start up it's all about getting it out the door, there's little to no expectation of having to maintain it for any real length of time.
HN has some hot takes but that one is particularly impressive.
Fortnite, Roblox, League of Legends, Counter Strike . . . all very short term projects.
For every game like that, there are a thousand games that shipped, maybe got a few updates, and then they were done.
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