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Comment by salqadri | Hacker News Reader

Wow this is crazy; I'm surprised its still going on after all this time. Doesn't seem healthy imo to stick just one project for so long without significant ROI. But yes, commendable indeed, and I hope people got significant value out of it, for his sake.

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> Doesn't seem healthy imo to stick just one project for so long without significant ROI.

I don't think he's in it for the money. I think that he, and many game developers of a similar vintage, are frustrated with the direction that modern software has taken. It's slow, getting slower, and often doesn't work correctly. I think this is his way of expressing that frustration, by teaching how the machine you're programming ACTUALLY WORKS. I for one have gotten more out of Handmade Hero than any other single source of learning in my life.

2 years is nothing for a video game project. Also, keep in mind he's only working on it while he's streaming, which is 5 hours a week (max. sometimes, it's less). He's also been making a game he intends to sell for money for the past 2 years (1935[0]).

[0]: https://mollyrocket.com/news_0023.html

I think it has healthy funding from his Patreon account, plus the $15 to buy the game, as well as serving as sort of inadvertent PR for his upcoming commercial game (1935.)

He's a craftsman practicing his craft. You have a strange concept of what is unhealthy.

The purpose of the project is education. It does have significant ROI, just not significant commercial profit.

Exactly. True education is something you do to give people humongous ROI on their time, not something you do for your own ROI.

> Doesn't seem healthy imo to stick just one project for so long without significant ROI.

Maybe the ROI is the feedback and such from the community that has popped up around the game? That, and the $15.00 per copy to get access to the source code as the series goes on. But I'd be willing to bet that the feedback and community is the driving thing for this guy.

My understanding is that Casey was specifically bothered by newer game programmers not understanding the underlying internals and writing slow software. Seems like he wanted to do something about it and this was his expression and attempt of doing so!

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