Some Parting Advice


This chapter has likely shown you that there is a lot of drudgery on any software project and games are no exception. Back in the dark ages I built game projects by typing in commands at the command prompt and checking boxes on a sheet of paper. Since most of this work happened way after midnight I made tons of mistakes. Some of these mistakes wasted time in copious amounts—mostly because the test team had a broken build on their hands, courtesy of a under caffeinated Mike McShaffry.

Without using branching techniques, all the programmers had to tiptoe around their code during a build. Everyone knew that moving targets are impossible to hit. Programmers take a long time to get in a good zone. If you break their concentration by halting progress to do a build you lose valuable time.

My parting advice is to always automate the monkey work, give the test team a good build every time, never ever get in the way of a programmer in the zone, and find a way to share your code. Sounds like heaven to me.




Game Coding Complete
Game Coding Complete
ISBN: 1932111751
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 139

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