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| ▲ | dgellow a day ago | parent | next [-] | | He’s known for his Handmade hero series (unfortunately archived now) where he developed his game over 500+ episodes: https://hero.handmade.network/ I’m sure you can find bugs in the work of any game dev you would consider legendary, game implementation is generally very messy | | |
| ▲ | bena a day ago | parent [-] | | 660+ and the game was never finished | | |
| ▲ | squh 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You have to consider that each episode is only ~2 hours and every line of code was written on stream. That's about 7 months or so of full-time work. Within that time a lot of the hours was spent teaching instead of coding, too. There is massive amount of knowledge in there for anyone bothering to actually learn something and it was all provided free of charge. Hats off to Casey for sticking to it as long as he did. | |
| ▲ | inigyou a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Doesn't mean you can't learn a lot from the attempt. Technical craftsmanship and project management skill are two completely separate skills. Definitely don't learn project management from Casey. | | |
| ▲ | tialaramex a day ago | parent [-] | | Sure, but the biggest reason to direct anybody to these videos is that they should actually make that video game they want to make, not just think about it - and so the fact that Handmade Hero just trails off and doesn't end up producing a finished video game is a problem. The craftsmanship is dubious. I think it's a problem that people assume Casey knows what he's doing when so often he's like "We're doing it live" and Casey's hand coded solution is pretty bad whereas the thing which came in the box is very good. Casey understands Casey's version, and that's an upside if you are Casey but you are not. If the result was a finished game then hey, whatever, the game was finished and that matters. But that part didn't happen either, so then it's just like watching Tsoding or something. | | |
| ▲ | ahaferburg a day ago | parent | next [-] | | At some point I stopped caring about Handmade Hero because he just never got out of the global illumination rabbit hole. He should have followed that as a side quest, behind a feature flag. Maybe one week for progress on the game, one week for rendering experiments. He didn't seem to make much progress, and it just fizzled out as he ran out of steam. Finishing should have been a bit higher on the priority list. It was just not setting a good example from a project or self management perspective. | |
| ▲ | guitarlimeo 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well Billy Basso was hugely inspired by the Handmade Hero series and went on to make the critically acclaimed Animal Well because of it. That's enough of a win for that series in my eyes. | | |
| ▲ | tialaramex 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Animal Well is a great game, there's a lot in there and I appreciate it when a game is deep rather than big but I don't see much connection there. Maybe it's like how "Maze: Solve The World's Most Challenging Puzzle" (a book I disliked immensely) inspired Tonda Ros to make "Blue Prince" a game which I enjoyed tremendously. | | |
| ▲ | guitarlimeo 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Animal Well wouldn't exist without Handmade Hero, Billy himself said it in an interview. The first game architecture he made was RAII etc and full of spaghetti and then he actually followed Handmade Hero and started to getting somewhere. | | |
| ▲ | bena 2 minutes ago | parent [-] | | To be fair, there's another adage that comes into play here: Build one to throw away, you will anyhow. His second attempt, no matter how he made it, was made with the context of his earlier mistakes. RAII doesn't lead to spaghetti code necessarily. If anything, "unity builds" would more encourage spaghetti as it's easier to reference anything else in your build. |
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| ▲ | andersonpico 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | animal well is such an incredible game and it shows how talented Billy Basso is in multiple disciplines |
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| ▲ | 3eb7988a1663 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | John Carmack is a legendary game programmer. If I can identify a superior algorithmic approach to something in Doom, does that disqualify Carmack's credentials? | | |
| ▲ | tialaramex a day ago | parent [-] | | First I think I'd want to see you identify a superior algorithm known when Doom shipped and then we can have that discussion about who's credentials should be disqualified. | | |
| ▲ | 3eb7988a1663 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I never made claims to be any kind of game programmer, but sure. Fine, as I recall, Doom data assets are searched linearly whenever they need to pull new data. So if you switch to the chainsaw, and need to rev, the game does a linear scan of all graphics, maps, and sounds looking for the vroom noise. There are many different data structures that could perform this lookup faster. These have been known since the earliest days of computing. Does it matter? No. Engineering is all about trade-offs. A linear scan was obviously fast enough and simple to implement. Similarly, if walk monster manually trolls the map, that does not say anything about Casey in isolation. I believe all of Blow's games use a custom game engine, so unless a nav mesh system was already implemented, that was going to take additional work. The walk monster may have been better bang-for-buck. | | |
| ▲ | tialaramex 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | You probably have a point on linear search for assets (I haven't checked but I've assumed you're right about how it works in the released source) There are some tradeoffs here, my instinct would be to bring hash tables into play and that's perhaps a mistake because it means you're doing fewer reads but more arithmetic and on some hardware that's a bad trade. But "linear search" is only the simplest and probably not the smartest option. |
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| ▲ | dgellow a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think you’re both saying the same thing |
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