Experimenting with architectures for video games inspired by tabletop games

> realized I had programmed myself into a corner.

A lesson that the world seems to repeatedly reinforce is that quests to create something complicated with rigid adherence to pure/dogmatic/'perfect' abstraction end up this way.

The systems I've seen that don't jack knife themselves into oblivion grow like weeds and age like a forest. There's a perfect kind of messy where each little module takes takes root, being tested by the ecosystem and growing or dying.

Contrary to what many think, I don't think spaghetti nightmares happen in this mode unless code becomes functionally immortal by means other than battle testing.

Sometimes this happens because somebody's ego forces any woodbe gardeners to litigate all attempts at tending. Sometimes it happens because the pressure to X rises too high and it extinguishes all the controlled burns.

I remember wanting to feel like the thing I made was absolutely crystalline. Seeing how that ends has made me appreciate the organism.

I find that one drawback of building your software by knitting together existing frameworks or libraries is that their design choices, interfaces, and abstractions are fixed (and typically not in a way that they are going to fit together seamlessly).

This results in the need for glue-code, sometimes lots, and when you encounter architectural problems, you are much more constrained in how you can resolve them.

Sometimes that constraint is more than offset by the time saved writing the code, sometimes not.

Unless it's something really obvious or standard, these days I tend to start off with a "write it myself" mindset, until I really know I need something off the shelf, which is definitely the reverse of how I was when started my career and had a "just use a library" mindset.

> I gave this module its own immutable state. The state could be modified

this made me chuckle a bit

As a game developer for many many years, as soon as someone says “business logic” I know they are from the other side of the tracks.