Jonathan Blow - How to program independent games - CSUA Speech

Caption notes

Drawing on independent game development, Jonathan Blow weighs implementation time alongside runtime and memory. He recalls proposing a different data structure for Doom’s asset lookup, then finding that the lookup was only a small part of loading. He uses the story to argue for locating the bottleneck and accounting for the cost of implementing and maintaining extra code. The Q&A adds two qualifications. A shared system can be simpler when it replaces many specialized ones, and optimization can be worthwhile when platform constraints affect the game. This guide follows his experience and spoken argument. Performance and the on-screen demonstration were not independently verified.