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Comment by tobyhinloopen | Hacker News Reader

And 0 value was added to the actual game. This is exactly how my side projects are never finished

0 value may have been added to the game. A lot of value was added to the author.

Same here, but maybe the goal of his side project is to learn and not ship a product.

In any case, you're not wrong, but I assume most people writing a game in C as opposed to leveraging a tool like Unity are more interested in diving in and learning something new rather than shiping something.

They're very different attitudes indeed. E.g. compare OP to the level storage of VVVVVV: https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/cf53de9ed5cd82a...

Although to be fair I'm sure the author wrote a program that generated that array :-)

I certainly hope so.

I love the reference to this because I'm working on a side project and treating it as "something I definitely want to ship" and have found that I have higher tolerance for code that I just copy/paste and slapdash together. I've worked on lots of side projects in the past where I was more deliberate about every line of code and learned that shipping is more important to me now than learning something new.

I will say most of the choices I'm making with respect to when to go "deep" with good design are very much calculated. I'm designing the architecture with a lot of thought, but when it comes to laying out UI elements, I will copy-paste and not refactor even if there's a good opportunity for it. It's just plumbing to me, so if it's ugly, it's not a big deal.

With some practice, things like this take between a couple of hours to a couple of days of investment, total. I would say it is a fair price to pay, whenin exchange you get to explore the design space, get to practice some important skills, and get a lot of control over how you want to do things, and get rid of a nasty dependency that might bite you later.

Of course, there are some things that you are not going to do that a solid library gets you for free.

Writing a custom configuration format seems like some prime quality yak shaving :-) Probably flatbuffers would be a good choice for the author needs.

One of the reasons service configurations on OpenBSD (e.g. pf.conf, ipsec.conf, etc) are so convenient and expressive is because they don't shy away from defining and implementing custom configuration syntax using yacc.

At some point somebody needs to implement the configuration interface for the human. Punting things by preferring boilerplate, machinable formats and libraries doesn't actually solve the problem.

C literals const struct files are actually a nice format with no runtime. If you compile in .3s a big C file your compile time wont matter.

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