Today’s update is really a lack of update. This is a great opportunity to introduce my holy commandments; my hero John Romero (of Id Software fame) has a fantastic talk where he recalls the early years of Id Software and explains the principles of programming they developed while rapidly building a tonne of games with a very small team at Id software, including Doom.
John says that you must always maintain shippable code. This means that you should always be able to play and test at any moment during development. I have broken this rule by ambitiously working on the Level editor for my game which has completely broken playability of the game. But that’s OK, John has another rule “Great tools, make great games”. As I’m protected by the concept of necessity in criminal law, I’m OK with breaking one of John’s rules to prevent a worse crime.
Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll be able to provide a demo of my level editor; which was the main purpose of this Game Jam. To build the necessary building blocks so that my kids and me can build out a really solid Strategy Game.
Buy the poster from John Romero’s personal shop
Full list of John Romero’s programming principles
John’s talk on the Early days of Id Software and his programming principles from GDC 2016: