Holden
reedrehg.bsky.social
Holden
@reedrehg.bsky.social
Just an independent game maker, standing in front of a game engine, asking for it to play nice today.
For sure. Love seeing different, creative variations of it.
June 4, 2025 at 6:11 PM
I'll take a fromsoft style 100ft tall door or mile long bridge please.
June 4, 2025 at 5:28 PM
The AI trash tidal wave is brewing 😞, so I really hope that either 1. we as a society end up just rejecting and constraining it or 2. it becomes so expensive that it outweighs whatever benefits people are getting from it because at some point the GenAI companies have to actually try to be profitable
May 29, 2025 at 11:27 AM
The enshitification is on the way
May 29, 2025 at 11:21 AM
For sure, learn the patterns now, whether you agree with them or not.

But I honestly think if devs learned like that, then shit would be less complicated. We wouldn't be using a lot of enterprise patterns that were just blindly accepted as "the way". We're just overcomplicating most things.
May 22, 2025 at 6:12 PM
Yes, especially for juniors.

Ok if you're a junior at a company, don't go wild & piss off coworkers if there's an agreed way of writing code.

In personal projects go wild. There are devs with 3 months experience terrified of globals because everyone told them it's bad. Experiment. Try everything.
May 22, 2025 at 5:47 PM
Ha I did notice that and ya I've used it for the same type of scenario (continue a loop). Another thing that gets a really bad rap but in small simple scenarios is 🤷‍♂️
May 22, 2025 at 5:23 PM
Might be :D
I've mostly built web stuff too. Definitely not saying to make everything global, but even in huge projects, there are places where some global state can just save you some headache.
May 22, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Why not Singletons instead? Those are just globals. Don't trick yourself.
May 22, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Not very testable? There's an extra step of setup for tests, but plenty testable. I'd argue easier than dealing with the annoyance that comes with DI and such. Also I'm wary of letting testability drive how the code works. I've seen some convoluted stuff just to be able to write a mocked test.
May 22, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Memory allocation? This doesn't seem like a globals problem. This is an allocation scheme problem. Not everything should be global, not everything needs to exist for the lifetime of a program. But for data that does, allocate globals on init, clean up on shutdown.
May 22, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Shadowing? I've just never had an issue where I shadowed a global variable without knowing it. IDEs, LSPs, some compiler warnings, will catch this.
May 22, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Namespace issues? Depends on how the language handles scope, but if you are bringing in a bunch of dependencies that also have globals in the same namespace then fair, it's a problem. Not all languages have this issue.
May 22, 2025 at 2:16 PM
No constraints? That's fine. Everything does not need to be encapsulated and hidden away and wrapped with getter setters. If every time the var changes you really need something else to happen, write a function.
May 22, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Hard to understand (non-locality)? you know what's harder to understand than a reference to a global? 10 layers of DI and abstraction nonsense.
May 22, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Even more than the tutorial. I bang my head against the wall trying to design the game in chronological order beginning to end, but I constantly get stuck. When I ignore that and just build up misc. pieces/mechanics, and then order/rearrange stuff later, I get to a more interesting game faster.
May 21, 2025 at 1:51 PM
💯
May 21, 2025 at 2:44 AM
Being able to hold 90% of the language in your head is absolutely why I'm enjoying it. There's not 200 different ways to do a thing, no bloated standard lib. There's a couple of things I'd like to see (like a test runner) but also it wasn't difficult to roll that yourself in 100 lines of code.
May 17, 2025 at 2:28 PM