Making THE OCTOBER GAME: Noob Mistakes
Based on the dozens of game dev and programming blogs I read, I can’t say that I’ve made every mistake in the book. I mean, I haven’t been doing this long enough. Still, I’ve made enough to be a little humble.
A lot humble.
Anyway, here a nice list of mistakes to watch out for if you’re a noob developer. Not an exhaustive list, just ways I’ve personally messed up in the last year.
- Attempting too large a project for my experience level
- Letting the scope of a small project grow without bound
- Writing code in a clever fashion
- Writing code in a terse or convoluted manner to save some typing
- Trying to write elegant code from the start
- Writing “optimized” code before checking if it’s a performance bottleneck
- Reformatting sample code before making sure it runs
- Inappropriately long or short variable names
- Coding before designing
- Leaving a prototype in a broken state
- Not capturing lessons learned every time code is written
- Not testing early, often and the obvious stuff like -init, -dealloc and -description methods
- Not breaking down tasks into small enough pieces
- Not committing to a deadline
- Starting a new project before finishing an old one
- Building too much functionality before testing it
- Working such long stretches, my brain turns to mush
OK, I’m the king of humility. No one I know even comes close.
Just do the opposite of these things and you’ll be WAY ahead.