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Underrated but true.

It always was far easier to train a creative thinker in how to operate the tools needed to facilitate their vision than it is to get a great tools operator to have good ideas.

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Classic indie games such as Undertale/Deltarune, Terraria and VVVVVV had horrible code but it didn't matter because they were actually good games, and that's because their creators spent all their character points on making a good game instead of obsessing over monads.

That describes pretty much the whole game industry tbh. Game dev is notorious for being a horrible mess of hacks on top of hacks

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_...

Quake is the exception here. Read the codebase of any successful game from the past 40y and you’re very, very likely to see a complete mess

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