twentyYearsOfExperience

Even if it’s a class or a dictionary type thing

I assumed it was generated. It is generated, isn't it?

Or sometimes you just push though and release the game. There are people that spend years polishing the code while never releasing anything. And then there are people that just write whatever works, release and move on to the next project.

People were pointing at random stuff like this in the Balatro code, yet the game is an award winning commercial success.

Allegedly this is bad on purpose for the ARG component of the game.

I'm surprised people only now started spamming this sub, considering this guy has been getting dunked on for months by now, and it's only now that I actually see people make hateposts about him here.

Or you know, use a SQLite database like a normal person.

Mason*

So it's a solo dev who works on a game called Heartbound, and it's on of his dev streams where he shows code.

He's got some other escapades like hating on Stop Killing Games. His "history" is also questionable. He claims to have worked for the government, "hacking power plants" and that he's got 20 years in the business, his dad worked for blizzard or something and he's worked at blizzard as a QA too. He's also participated in a few defcons. He claims to have been working in cybersecurity, and people say he was a pentester.

Someone recently did a video going over his code in dev streams and called him out for poor practices, and the guy apparently replied with a whole ass "nothing burger" statement.

I watched both videos, and one of this guy's claims is that "Good coding practices are only important if you're working in a team", and failed to miss the point that the original code reviewer mentioned, where code readability makes it much easier to understand code years into the future and simplifies the process. This picture sums it up perfectly.

The game has been in early access/development for years now, and it's honestly going down the same path that YandereDev went down, with poorly formatted code and stupidly complex code to parse through, and this screenshot sums up why it is the case because he's obviously got so many things to fix in the event of a bug.

Now, some of it is due to GameMaker being weird, but the problems extend farther than that.

This guy codes on stream. He’s had a few mildly weird takes and less than honourable gameplay moments recently and for some reason that’s been permission for everyone in here to hyper focus on him and shit on his code for 3 days

Even bootcamps teach you how to use for loops.

The biggest thing here is it results in a lot of magic numbers — the indexing of the array is just a meaningless int to pull out a particular flag.

I don’t know anything about the game they’re building or what language, but the first step would probably be to use a map or dictionary so that you can look up these flags using a meaningful index (like an Enum)

You could probably go farther and hide those implementation details in a class, and hand the class a game state object (eg completed quests, current modifiers, flags, etc), and then have it spit out the next sequence for you.

It really depends on how isolated each component or sequence or quest of the game is, and then building a system that allows you to look up this kind of data in a modular way rather than pulling from a master array.

That being said there’s nothing wrong with coding like this if it works and fits within the scope and your ability as a programmer. Lost of great games have weird code. But I think there are other reasons people are shitting on this dude though I don’t really keep track of that kind of stuff

The most basic thing he could do is have a file with array indexes as const, like

int NOIR_EVENT_PLAYED = 198; int INVENTORY_CHAPTER_2_SOCKS = 199; int POOL_DID_WE_SAY_NO_TO_JOE = 200; ...

and then in this file instead of global.storyline_array[198] = 0; // Noir - Events played (0|X ...) you would have global.storyline_array[NOIR_EVENT_PLAYED] = 0; // (0|X ...)

Which is better because then, in other files, instead of doing

// Noir - Events played if (global.storyline_array[198] == 0) { ... }

You can just do if (global.storyline_array[NOIR_EVENT_PLAYED] == 0) { ... }

Which is much better because if at some point for whatever reason you want to change the 198 to 199 you only have to change it in that one const file.

The other good thing about this (very basic, you can do much better, structs etc) approach is that if you know later down the line that you want to do something with this particular event (in this case "Noir - Events played"), it's much easier with an IDE to go global.storyline_array[NOIR, and here you auto complete, it'll show you every var that starts or contains the word NOIR and you can pick exactly the value you need rather than having to go to your array, look for noir, find it's 198, and then use 198.

As much as reading the code "makes sense," it's really so far from good design principles to even give a succint answer as to how this should be done.

For starters, using a map with descriptive keys would be better. Instead of array_name[x] == 0 for has the menu been checked, you'd have map_name["Has menu been checked"] so that it's clearer what you're checking for without having to refer back to these code comments. That's only if you really wanted to store this information in a global dataset for some reason. There are plenty of better ways that follow OOP principles.

An example of a better way is to store these values on the relevant objects. Instead of having a global variable for each of these flags, store the flag on the related object and query it when you need to. E.g. a menu object with an isChecked flag. That way, you can query the object for the value, and everything will be in the types you expect them to be, and you can easily restrict when this value can be modified.

True, some game devs are only taught the basics from a script language and for most of the time it is the only thing needed; simple data structures, commands to show dialogue/menus, control progress on quests, etc.

I once helped on a ragnarok private server, and their custom code was painful to read, tons of goto 'label' statements and very crude use of variables, but looking back, it was amazing what that one admin did all by herself without any background on programming

He said he was a hacker for gov...

Game developer for 15 years with published titles on Playstation, Steam. I do software engineering as well on contracts on the side and I whole heartedly disagree. You are confusing hobbyists that strike gold with professionals.

Sure creative success in game dev is not a benchmark of programming skill. If you have a vision and enough skill to execute it, that's great. Undertale is a good example.

The issue for Piratesoftware is how much he overplays his technical skills.

If you're going to give advice for indie hobbyist game devs be honest there is no shame and it's admirable to get that far with weak programming skills. We've all been there.

But to speak as if you're authority on the matter is pretty shitty and when you deliberately hide your technical skills it's very shitty.

This man has more haters than any politician

You answered your own question. People want to dunk on him because of StopKillingGames. If that had never happened, nowhere near as many people would be giving a shit.

Many comments aren't even reviewing his code. I've read on multiple posts of this image why he's not using booleans instead of 0 and 1. If people actually looked at the code they'd see, that many lines have more than 2 possible states so a boolean wouldn't make sense.

He's been making a single game that's never left early development for over a decade despite an abundance of crowdfunding income

It's true what they say. You either publish a Concerned Ape, or you develop long enough to see yourself become a Yandere Dev

It’s GameMaker, the language is… unique, and quite limiting in some ways. You don’t always get to write code you want, but have to write how it wants