Games From Within

Over the years I’ve read hundreds of technical books. Some of them had some great new ideas, others were great introductions to specific topics, and others had a knack for explaining some complex topic in a very easy to understand way. But in the end, which books had the most impact on me? If I had to go back and pick only a handful of books, which ones would I pick? This is that list.

“Maintenance? I never do maintenance!” I hear you say. “I’m a game programmer! A coder who lives on the bleeding edge and doesn’t have to bother with boring stuff like that. That’s for stuffy database programmers, not for me.” Have you ever tackled a problem that was supposed to be solved by writing some code in half an hour, but that code haunted you (or your coworkers, much to their chagrin I’m sure) for months or years to come? Then you have felt first hand the consequences of maintenance, the hidden cost of software.

For small projects, we can blissfully code away without paying any attention to physical structure and we won’t be any worse off for it. However, as a project grows, it reaches a critical point where build times become unbearably slow. This article looks into the reasons for such slow build times and explores some techniques to speed things up.

The sun is shining, the air is warm, leaves are finally coming out. Spring is here. Time to put on my rose-colored glasses and do some armchair quarterbacking. I often find myself saying “If I owned a game company I would make sure to do such and such,” so here we go.

It is true that no tools are necessary to apply good software engineering techniques, but they can often be a big help. The third and last session of “By the Books: Software Engineering in the Games Industry” concentrated exclusively on languages and tools, and participants shared their favorite tools and warned others about potential duds.