Idk, games I guess

I grew up during that period when newgrounds was a major media site. A lot of the games were not very good, especially the one I made with a pirated adobe flash CS3. But hey, the score was your health and that was something that someone called “An unusual mechanic” which is the closest to a compliment that I got.

There’s something about game design that I’ve never really figured out, the stitching together of things with no degrees of freedom, such as cut-scenes, with full level roving movement with vertical traversal ability. It’s a state machine, I understand, but that’s a lot of state to manage unless it’s all just a flip of a pointer or an int.

But that requires forethought, and through the integration of the multiple systems I feel like I lose my plot. Intertwining the graphics with the control and the physics or the cutscene and the audio, there’s so much to manage, and it’s always impressed me when everything feels well thought out in a game, that the devs built a very sleek engine that runs fast and handles hundreds of objects all following their own rules and physics and decisions.

Or maybe my sensibilities about computer performance are hampered by forgetting that these things are very orthogonal. That the input and the graphics make no sense to couple. The gameplay only needs minimal coupling to the input to adjust some numbers and then it should take off from there.

But it never seems that simple to me I like working at a low level, and that means that I avoid using an abstraction I’m not confident I understand at that level. But ultimately, it isn’t possible to understand a game engine like an implementation of Levenshtein distance or a hashtable. It’s too big to hold in your brain at once. And it’s frustrating to let go, to accept that the engine was made by people who have an idea of what they’re doing, a pattern that scaled to the games that they chose to make with it.

And the specific implementation details aren’t really necessary to start with, but you need to start working with it before you can start to make progress to where you need that knowledge, and you can’t get good at this without doing it, without practicing and without being deliberate in the goals and decisions I can make about it.