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Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: August 10th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 576 (previous three years) + 155.75 (current year) = 731.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 775 (previous three years) + 10 (current year) = 785 / 1000

Sometimes, Test-Driven Development makes the simple stuff hard, but once it is done, it’s so beneficial. Case in point: the main menu. I’ve been working on the main menu for my Vampire game, and in the past, I would have probably got it knocked out quite easily. TDD forces a good design to appear, but in exchange I have to spend a little more time on it than I expected. The nice thing is that it won’t be as hard-coded and game-specific as my normal implementations would.

And a side benefit of using TDD so far? My build times are obscenely fast. It takes just over 20 seconds to build my entire game from scratch, and I suspect a good chunk of that time to be the extracting and building of my unit test framework. Granted, my game doesn’t do much right now, but it is very satisfying to know that it takes almost no time at all to go from a fresh project pulldown to a finished and tested build. I credit TDD with forcing me to use interfaces, short functions, and fewer dependencies.

[tags]game, game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]