Efficient Programmer++: Examples and Anti-Examples
summary
Concrete engineering practices for game development: use Python scripting for game logic, use Jira or a bug tracker to prioritize A/B bugs, and build an early vertical slice to validate fun. Concrete examples include refactoring a naive linear search to return early to reduce time and memory, and fixing console memory fragmentation by locking pools during level loads; also a warning that waterfall planning caused multi‑year delays on a project (1996–2001).
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:05Goals of this talk
- 3:45My journey
- 5:23Bad engineering vs good engineering
- 7:17Feature creep
- 10:22Waterfall development
- 11:39Hofstadter’s Law / Pareto’s Law
- 16:02Broken Windows Principle (Pragmatic Programming)
- 19:45Console memory management
- 25:10Bugs and their tracking flow
- 28:14Tools
- 29:24Level states / sequences
- 32:39Proof of Concept (PoC)
- 33:53Vertical Slice (VS)
- 36:04Pre-production vs production
- 37:22Ownership
- 42:38High-level planning
- 43:56Finalizing projects Polish: less is more
- 44:35Features and pillars
- 45:07Acknowledgments
- 45:43Mentioned books (and others)
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