VVVVVV

Nobody's criticising Quake's code the same way they criticise the games I listed, which are full of magic numbers indexing lines of dialog or quest flags, and giant switch statements on the game state: https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/master/desktop_...

One great Open Source game that comes to mind is definitely VVVVVV. - https://thelettervsixtim.es - https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV

As a prime example of this, I'd point to the horrifying source for VVVVVV, a darling indie game of its time: https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/vvvvvv (my favorite piece: https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/master/desktop_...) (There was also discussion about it on HN before as well, if one is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22011358) That said, refactoring for later gains might be wasted time if you have only a certain amount of scope planned for the rest of time, counter to the typical heuristic.

there's also https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV which spawned quite a lot of discussion here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22011358

While it's true there's a lot of deep coding that can go into games (especially ones which push the capabilities of the hardware), it's also quite possible with the tools we have to make very successful (and quite good) games with fairly little coding ability. A lot of indie games are a complete trainwreck at the source code level and yet very fun to play. For a good example, see the source code for VVVVVV[0], which is not elegant or high quality C++ code (and it was ported from not particularly elegant ActionScript) but it clearly did the job. [0] https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV

They're very different attitudes indeed. E.g. compare OP to the level storage of VVVVVV: https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/cf53de9ed5cd82a...

Wow a 3440 line switch statement for processing game state! https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/master/desktop_...

How those rooms are implemented: https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/master/desktop_...

I figured OP was referring specifically to defining j twice, which would definitely have been a WTF, but it seems in the actual source it's i,j,k. So, still weird, but better. https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/master/desktop_...

Did they use a transpiler or something for the mobile version? Lot of magic numbers and odd code like this if (t == 0) t = 0; if (t == 1) t = 20; if (t == 2) t = 14; if (t == 3) t = 15; if (t == 4) t = 13; if (t == 5) t = 16; or case 17: blocks[k].prompt = "Press ENTER to activate terminal"; if(mobilemenus) blocks[k].prompt = "Activate terminal"; blocks[k].script = "terminal_warp_1"; setblockcolour(k, "orange"); trig=0; break; case 18: blocks[k].prompt = "Press ENTER to activate terminal"; if(mobilemenus) blocks[k].prompt = "Activate terminal"; blocks[k].script = "terminal_warp_2"; setblockcolour(k, "orange"); trig=0; break; case 19: blocks[k].prompt = "Press ENTER to activate terminal"; if(m

This is really great! I wish they wouldn't call it "open source", though. It looks like a source-available license: https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/master/LICENSE.... If Terry is reading this, please correct your article. The correct terminology is important! Open source is defined by the OSD, which this license doesn't qualify for: https://opensource.org/osd Kudos for releasing your game's source, though! Edit: I sent Terry an email and he agreed to change it <3 Thank you! Edit 2: Ethan Lee worked on this! Ethan Lee is an awesome person. Ethan is probably the single biggest contributor to gaming on Linux, and he's always worked in the background. Thanks Ethan, you rock, and deserve more credit.

Quite cool, although the license is quite strict: https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/master/LICENSE....