A Series of Fortunate Events
Well, we’re just about to ship this thing. Big sighs of relief can be heard across the studio.
What have I been working on? TRC stuff. TRC stuff is the kind of stuff such as buttons and menus and the text messages for memory card errors, disk errors, controller errors, etc. when you play a game. It’s the kind of stuff you hope your customer never sees, but if they do, you want it to be as friendly and helpful as possible. Certainly not glamorous, but it’s the kind of stuff that the publishers and hardware manufacturers drill you on.
And it’s been another case of software rot. I haven’t been following the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle very well, and now my code is littered with multiple paths that do very similar things and have to be updated when a bug affects one or more of them. One perk is that I did use a continuation passing style, and it’s worked out marvelously well. Much better than the switch statement state machine nightmares that can happen so often in these types of software modules.
The upside is that I’ve been tasked with making sure that our engine has a module to do all this kind of stuff for future games. It means that I get to go back and make it right again. Again, not glamorous, but how often do you get to redo a piece of software right? I’m looking forward to that.
This should be the last weekend I have to work for the rest of the year. It should also be the last week of really late nights. I’m so looking forward to working just 8 hour days again, it’s going to seem like a vacation.
