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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, Casey's been working on Handmade Hero for almost a decade, and has what amounts to an overengineered debug room with less actual gameplay complexity than you'd find in any framework tutorial. Meanwhile actual game developers would pick up a framework, use all those abstractions and libraries Casey finds unnecessary and surpass Handmade Hero in an afternoon.

There's something to be said for not wasting time on things that don't matter to anyone but yourself, and code aesthetics is often one of those things.

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What's hilarious is that if you actually look at the code he's written for it, it's a horrible ball of spaghetti. The whole thing is a scam. Just because HE says "this is bad code" doesn't mean it's bad, and just because he wrote it, it doesn't mean it's good. Most people would find the clusterfuck he wrote unmaintainable, and the funny thing is that it doesn't even really DO ANYTHING YET.

The goal of Handmade Hero is to show how to do everything from scratch, not how to make a game as fast as possible using existing technology. I agree that the game is currently light on the gameplay side of things, but he said countless times that he doesn't like gameplay code and that he's an engine programmer. I don't know if you watched a lot of episodes, but actually, each hour of him programming is full of complicated stuff which is hard to follow, but he does that in the blink of an eye. Each time you think that you understood something, he starts doing something way more complicated and he always nails it. Look at how many programming streamers are able to speak 2+ hours continuously without any cut. Most of the youtubers have to look at their source code written before turning the camera on to be able to retype it during the video! Even for a simple Tetris or something!

I'm curious to know what you think is unmaintainable in his codebase. Sure he uses alternative little-known techniques for say, memory management, but once you know what is going on, the code is pretty clear I think.

He posted an issue about the Windows terminal being slow, and proposed simple things to speed things up. What happened? The Windows Terminal team declared that what he proposed is an entire doctoral research project that would be a massive investment. He did the freaking thing in 2 days and said that it's "nothing" and "very simple". The team then apologized for being dumb and is now working on implementing his idea, that they described as "original" and "very valuable"

He works on HH for about 2 hours per week.

That's still far too much time for far too little progress. Six hundred videos and counting, each over an hour in length. What is there to learn except how not to develop a game, much less (as I recall him claiming) a AAA quality game.

That's not true. He works on it offline, and honestly, even if he did only work on it 2 hours per week, it's STILL not as far along as it should be by now for a supposed game development "guru." You got hoodwinked.

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