I’m starting to think that “good code” is simply a myth. They’ve drilled a lot of “best practices” into me during my masters, yet no matter how mich you try, you will eventually end up with something overengineered, or a new feature or a bug that’s really difficult to squeeze into whatever you’ve chosen.

But, ok, that doesn’t proove anything, maybe I’m just a vad programmer.

What made me sceptical however isn’t that I never managed to do it right in any of my projects, but the last two years of experience working on porting games, some of them well-known and larger games, to consoles.

I’ve already seen several codebases, each one with different take on how to make the core game architecture, and each one inevitably had some horrible issues that turned up during bugfixing. Making changes was hard, it was either overengineersled and almost impenetrable, or we had to resort tonugly hacks since there simply wasn’t a way how to do it properly without rewriting a huge chunk.

Right now, my whole prpgramming knowledge about game aechitecture is a list of “this desn’t work in the long run”, and if I were to start a new project, I’d be really at loss about what the fuck should i choose. It’s a hopeless battle, every aproach I’ve seen or tried still ran into problems.

And I think this may be authors problem - ot’s really easy to see that something doesn’t work. " I’d have done it diferently" or “There has to be a better way” is something that you notice very quickly. But I’m certain that watever would he propose, it’d just lead to a different set of problems. And I suspect that’s what may ve happening with his leads not letting him stick his nose into stuff. They have probably seen that before, at it rarely helps.