alt Hacker NewsThe idea you have to pick between reasonable engineering and fun is a false dichotomy. Of course not every game will have the time budget to fix every unintended feature but your example game would have been more enjoyable (especially for the mentioned Playstation users) if the code had been written a bit better.
Replies
socalgal2 • last Thursday at 4:37 PM
It’s not a false dichotomy imo. If the creator of Blue Prince had concentrated on code quality it’s likely they’d never have shipped. The same would be true for the creator of Undertale.
I think for games like Blue Prince, specifically, it’s not a false dichotomy.
Those are made in tiny teams. You can either spend more time tinkering with the gameplay mechanics and experimenting with the game parts; or you can put on your software engineer hat and make the code better (or, spend even more time to learn how to make the code better in the first place!).
This gets less true with scale of a team, and with 5000 people behemoths you probably should care _a lot_ more about the code; but ROI on improving the code in (relatively! Calling Blue Prince “small” is ridiculous.) small games is very dubious.