A few thoughts on coding video games
By Chris
I thought I would share a few thoughts on coding video games.
Probably anyone who’s ever been involved in creating a video game will tell you it’s hard work. I mean seriously hard work. Turns out video games are complex beasts and getting from vision to correctly functioning game can be one heck of an ordeal. Honestly, it’s not for the faint of heart.
Some things we got right from the start. Many things we did not. One particular bummer was incredibly painful to fix halfway through the project. It was caused by my misunderstanding how game state is saved to disk in Unity games.
ReliveIt has a particularly complex game state. It may not look like it but there are hundreds of different kinds of things that need to be saved to disk. The player can jump from one ReliveIt life to another and come back to a life they left months ago. They can even jump back to an earlier age in their current life. Every little detail in those lives from the colour of your boyfriend’s hair to the price of real estate in Geneva needs to be persisted and later rehydrated so that the player can seamlessly continue from where they were.
If you don’t plan in advance how this is going to work in your game it will bite you hard at some point. In ReliveIt’s case it took several months to fix it. Today with coding agents probably the issue isn’t as severe but still, better to plan such fundamental architecture properly from the start.