Gamedev piece of advice you wish you'd known earlier?

[Sirocco]

What's something you wish you had learned/heard/discovered years ago?

I guess mine, somewhat embarrassingly, would be establishing simple, flexible timers for general use. We have access to these in the industrial automation space, and they work wonderfully. For whatever reason, I didn't get around to making a C-equivalent of that until 2014 or so. I usually have 30-40 different timers running in the background that I can use for simple animation and sequencing. You set a timer up with a span, tick rate in milliseconds, and behavior type at the end of the count (count once, repeat, ping-pong). You can pick up a count, and a 'done' bit triggers each time the count completes.

I feel turbo-stupid for not getting that set up earlier.

[PoV]

I don't exactly do that, but I'll often have multiple counters, and I treat time as something measured in frames. Millisecond time is used to check if 1/60th of a second (i.e. a frame) has passed. If it has, you execute a frame. If not, you don't.

Frames must always be executed in order. If you ever drop a frame, you can omit updating the screen, but you instead must focus on stepping/moving everything until you've caught up. Having a fixed frame time system, and guarantees that every frame will be executed simplifies a lot of logic. You can trigger events on the exact frame of a counter (i.e. ==), either a global counter, or one embedder into an animation system instance.

Anyway, that's my take on that: counters, and frames as the basic unit of game time measurement.

***

Programming things I wish I learned earlier: I don't hate PHP; I like JavaScript; Rust is kinda awesome. Making engines is fun, but a product released sooner is potentially way more valuable (if you're not doing anything cutting edge).

Other things I wished I learned earlier:

- Inflation is about 2% per year. If you're not earning more than that in interest, your money (savings) is eroding.
- With that in mind, doing something sooner is often cheaper than doing it later, thanks to inflation.
- THERE WERE SO MANY NO BRAINER INVESTMENTS OVER THE PAST 20 YEARS! It was totally worth investing in companies you trust.
- There's nuance to it, but there seems to be some shenanigans' with collateralized loans and investments.
- YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ALL THE WORK! THAT INCLUDES CODE! YOU CAN HIRE PEOPLE! "Work on your business, not in your business"
- YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE GAMES! IF YOU DON'T MAKE GAMES, YOU MIGHT HAVE CREATED A SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS IN LIKE, A YEAR. Then you require yourself to only work a few hours a week, and do WHATEVER THE HECK YOU WANT (including games) in the off time.

[Sirocco]

That's all good general advice, for sure.

I think one of the best practices I got into was making sure I try to improve my process in some tangible way with each project I take on (even the ones I don't finish). I usually start by identifying areas where I wasted unnecessary time, or didn't handle things well, and come up with a different approach. The upshot is knowing that I'm pushing myself toward better development (in general), with each failed project.

It's easy to just keep doing the same thing, ya know?

[PoV]

It's easy to just keep doing the same thing, ya know?

Ha, yeah.

I can't remember if it came up in discussion yet, I seem to be running a successful business now with real clients and everything. I struggled for a long time trying to make a video games business work. I tried one more time (nope), then pivoted into a sort of software/online event service business, and after not even a year I'm in a situation now where I can afford to hire a developer.

So anyway I'm definitely left with a lot of regrets regarding making my money go further, and letting myself NOT be the lead developer (though admittedly I haven't found the right candidate yet so I'm still doing everything).