This principle is related to the first one. Test thoroughly before checking in your code. We are our own best testing team and should never allow anyone else to experience bugs or see the game crash. But you can ask another developer to test your application, gathering more informed feedback and more help in fixing the bugs. You might think that developers should be able to see all the bugs they program. There are two main concepts summarised by this principle: firstly, the best testing team is made up by who developed the game secondly, do not allow other people to waste their time and see your bugs. Principle 5 – We are our own best testing team The great results of their products are clearly due to the hard work in finding (or creating) such powerful tools. He told about how many tests he and his team did in order to find and chose the best tools for their games. In his talk, Romero explained how the ability of creating great games strongly depends on the tools and the engines used for building them. This is the case with the Doom Engine (actually developed mostly by John Carmack), which is still downloadable and has been release with GPL License. Throughout his career, Romero has had the need (and the opportunity) to build several game engines, some of which gained a lot of popularity in the game development community. Principle 4 – Great tools make great games Moreover, even if you arrive at a working code for your goal, if it doesn’t seem intuitive, or is difficult to maintain, it is crucially important that you stop and try to figure out how to make it simpler. There is no reason to complicate things and this is especially true when you are part of a game development team. When you can do something simple, you should do it. ![]() This principle is, to some extent, a sort of corollary of the Occam’s razor principle. Bulletproof your engine by providing defaults upon load failure. It’s incredibly important that your game can always be run by your team. To allow testing during the development process, it is thus important to always provide defaults on load failure. As Romero said (and this is part of principle 5), “we are our own best testing team, and we should never allow anyone else to experience bugs or see the game crash ”. Always, at any time of the development process. In the development of a game, it is crucial that the entire team must be able to test the game they are creating. Always maintain constantly shippable code. Romero suggests exactly the opposite: fix any bug immediately, make the code polished and working, in order to maintain production code. Software developers often put some TODOs in their code, as a marker to remember to fix a bug later, just because it is simple to solve and they prefer to continue with the rest of the development. Principle 1 – No buggy prototypesĭuring his talk, John Romero explained that some of the current policies taken by software development companies should not be used in the context of game development. Keep looking at your functions and figure out how you can simplify further. ![]() In this article, we provide a summary of these principles, serving as a sort of “vademecum” for any game developers. ![]() During his talk, he used anecdotes and prior experiences to build a set of 10 programming principles that apply to game development. So it was no surprise that he was invited to deliver a speech at Codemotion Milan 2018, where he told his story from the beginning of his career until today. He participated in the development of hundreds of games and is now among the most influential game developers all around the world. The creator of the iconic videogame DOOM, John Romero, started developing games in 1980,then he co-founders Id software, an American video game development company known for having produced very popular games such as Doom, Wolfenstein and Quake.
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