These articles contain advice, tips or techniques.

Document Your Project

There's no shortage of assertions that conducting postmortem analysis of any decently-sized software development project is a good thing (there are academic papers, even). However, what often gets glossed over in these discussions is that the postmortem needs to be good to be helpful, and in order to be really ...

Choosing Tools

So, you want to be like the professional game developers, do you? You're a hot-shot hobby game developer with a great idea for the world's next killer MMO, and to make damn sure you build the best game you can you want to make damn sure you use the best ...

Don’t Read Source Code

I'm frequently irked by budding programmers deciding to waste their time writing bad tutorials about a subject immediately after gaining a basic understanding of it. As I discussed in that previous post, this "by-beginners-for-beginners" approach to writing tutorials is harmful. Tutorials, I repeat, are one of the worst ways for ...

Don’t Write Tutorials

Tutorials are one of the worst ways to learn new information available to a programmer. In part, this is due to failures inherent to the very concept of a tutorial itself -- typically designed to be oversimplified, direct demonstrations of a very specific technique or concept, they generally lack anything ...

On Game Schools

A "game school" is a learning institution that offers (exclusively or not) a degree- or certificate-granting program geared towards the formal study of something related to video games. What exactly this "something" is varies from school to school -- sometimes its art, sometimes it’s some vague "design" focus, and sometimes ...

“Master” Header Pitfalls

It's sometimes surprising how poorly-understood the C++ build process is. The preprocessor and its quirks seems to be particularly opaque to many, leading to the adoption of some harmful preprocessor practices. There's one issue I'm thinking of in particular right now, mostly because there's been a rash of users running ...

Performant Singletons

The singleton is probably one of the most controversial design patterns, sparking perennial debate on forums and discussion boards, and prompting analysis and dissection in many articles and papers. It is a bastardized design pattern, almost always misused, that causes a number of problems without really providing any benefits. Singletons ...

Write Games, Not Engines

To begin with, the term "engine" (specifically as it related to the game development world) has no strict definition. Therefore, in the interests of keeping everybody on the same page, I'll define the term as I intend to use it in this article. An "engine" is a collection of robust, ...

The Dangers of Benchmarks

Jack and Jill run a race. They're both the same age, wearing the same track shoes and other similar running attire. The weather is favorable -- a pleasant, windless summer afternoon, and they're running on that fancy red rubberized track. Jill soundly beats Jack by a margin of about half ...

Rewrite or Refactor

Often, inexperienced programmers will come to a point where they decide that their existing code base is fatally flawed in some way. Perhaps they've learned some new techniques that cannot be cleanly integrated into the code, perhaps they've stumbled across a requirement they cannot address, or perhaps they simply don't ...