Roguelike Radio Episode 119: Coding Practices
Mar 26, 2016
Nicolas Casalini (DarkGod), creator of Tome and veteran Lua engine designer. Josh Ge (Kyzrati), maker of CogMind, focused on simple, data-driven, testable systems. They discuss project structure and file organization. They cover data-driven content, separating engine from game, when to optimize, automated self-play testing and practical approaches to moddability and keeping secrets.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Keep Solutions Simple And Data-Driven
- Favor the simplest implementation that works and avoid needless complexity.
- Put configurable values into external data or scripts so you can change behaviour without editing core code.
The Massive Single-File Approach
- Mark Johnson kept his entire game in one massive Python file and resisted refactoring for feature work.
- He now considers splitting into a second file because editor crashes occur on very large single files.
Delay Optimization, Design Replaceable Interfaces
- Don’t optimize prematurely; implement simple code first and measure actual bottlenecks.
- Design interfaces so you can replace or optimize internals later without rewriting the whole game.