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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.

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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.

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