Lets Code is a blog that focuses on the challenges of code-making and how it can be improved. It’s written by two software engineers at Riot Games in Los Angeles, California.
It’s a collection of articles from their personal experiences, together with the stories of other engineers who have successfully overcome these challenges.
This isn’t about writing the most efficient code possible. This is about writing code that works, and is maintainable by others.
Lets Code is a blog about the challenges of game development and how it can be improved. It contains many puzzles with varying degrees of difficulty, which are designed to stimulate your mind and develop your programming skills.
The blog is meant to educate you in the practical applications of programming, as well as provide a place for you to learn more about the subject. It will also give you an opportunity to express your thoughts on the matter and ask questions that may not have been covered by the actual content. You can even share what you’ve learned with others!
The blog will be written by myself, Tomer Gazit. I am currently a software engineer at Electronic Arts working on Origin (EA’s digital distribution platform). I graduated from Princeton University with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (2011).
I took a walk with a friend recently and we talked about how to make a video game. He is an experienced developer who has done mobile and console games. We discussed the challenges we have had in the past and what we could do to overcome them.
One of the biggest issues that comes up when making a game is figuring out how to handle ‘events’ (e.g., when you go into battle or talk with someone). The problem is that there are so many different things that can happen, it can become overwhelming trying to plan for all of them. So what do you do?
The first thing my friend suggested was to use a simple scripting language like Lua or Python instead of C++ or Java (which are often used by professional developers). The reason why these languages might work better than C++/Java is because they allow you to create custom data types (objects) which will help you organize your code better. This way it’s easier to find bugs because they’ll be easier for other people understand when they look at the source code later on down the line (and not just because they’re familiar with those particular languages).
The second thing she said was that if possible, try using some type of editor like Notepad++ which allows programmers write their
In my last blog post, I discussed the importance of having a solid understanding of your game’s systems for designing levels that are not just fun but also functional. However, there is a lot more you can do once you have designed your systems to make them easier to use by level designers. In this blog post, I’m going to discuss some ways in which code can help level designers by making it easy for them to tell a story with their levels.
In my experience, the best way to get level designers excited about your game is to give them something very simple and easy for them to try out. If you give them a system that is too complicated, they will probably be intimidated by it and won’t be able to focus on the big picture of how their level fits into the game.
However, if you give them something simple that they can understand in less than a minute, they will feel empowered to use it how they want and start experimenting with their own ideas right away. This can lead to all kinds of exciting new possibilities that may not have been considered before because they were too difficult or time consuming for most people working on the project at hand.
A lot of people talk about the health and longevity of games (and the industry) as a whole, and for good reason. We want to make games that last for generations, or at least a few years. But what about the code that powers those games?
What if we could write code that could last longer than the project it was written for? What if we didn’t have to rewrite the same basic code over and over again every time we made a game?
We’ve all been there. The second we start working on a new game, one of our first tasks is finding out who wrote the engine/framework and what licenses are required. If neither you nor anyone on your team has experience with that engine, then you have to start learning it from scratch. Even if you do have experience writing code in that engine, you still have to go back through your old projects to find where you wrote the exact same features that you need now.
I’ve been thinking about this problem for a long time now, and I think I’ve come up with a solution: create an open source library with reusable, modularized code. It will be called “KevLib”, (“Kev” being my nickname) and it will be written mostly in C++.
Somehow, for the last year and a half, I have been writing about programming. It all started with a few blog posts about the challenges I was facing as a coder. The response from the community was overwhelming and I have been writing ever since.
Today, I will share some of my favorite posts from the past year, including how to scale, how to build something great that doesn’t end up in the trash and how to achieve what so many people are looking for: coding happiness.
I hope that you enjoy these posts as much as I enjoyed writing them. The first post is about what I call “coding happiness”:
The only thing you can control is yourself. And your happiness depends on it. Sometimes it is easy to forget this when we are working in teams where we are not always in control of our own destiny.
But if you focus on one thing: being happy. Then everything else will fall into place: your work, your relationships and your life will be better because of it. This has been my experience so far at least 🙂
What’s the worst part of your job? The long hours, the stress and the crap coffee? Well, quit your whining. At least you’re not a video game programmer.
According to a recent survey by Gamasutra, 28 percent of programmers said their jobs were “unhealthy” and 21 percent said they were “exhausting.”
The survey also found that more than half of programmers work more than 40 hours a week, and about a quarter work more than 60 hours per week (the average is 49). And those are just the ones who admit it.
In his book Game Design: Theory & Practice, Richard Rouse III says that when he was working as a game designer at Ion Storm, the company’s policy was to keep track of employees’ hours but not to publish them on paychecks. “This made it easier for everyone to lie about how many hours they worked,” he wrote.
Rouse says at another company where he worked, employees only got paid time-and-a-half if they worked more than 50 hours a week – so nobody admitted to working more than 50 hours.