How to program independent games

A really good talk by Jonathan Blow on writing code for independant games. He talks about a lot of different topics, but it's all mostly centered on the idea of getting better at getting things done, which as anyone who's worked on a long project knows, is a really important skill to pickup.

Having written games in C++ before, then moving over to RM and Ruby, I definitely agree with most of what he says. I find myself going for the simplest "good enough" way to solve things much more often than I used to, and I definitely get things up and running in a game much faster than I used to. I still write the occasional more complex algorithm if it's really important, but only after I've checked that the dumb solution isn't good enough.

The talk's a bit long, but it's really worth a watch, especially if you're doing your own scripting in your RM games.

I loved this talk, I watched it over and over and over .... I also go for the simplest and dumbest solution. especially when mapping or integrating systems. You can always go back and flush things out later.