The video game "VVVVVV" went #OpenSource today and someone discovered a several-hundred-case switch statement in the code.
#Vvvvvv switch code
As a random example, Cavanagh appears to have dozens of game states referring to cutscenes sprinkled among parts of the code that are also about things like gameplay modes and the main menu. Normally, many of these states might be grouped separately - the mini-game portions written in a different area than say, a jump mechanic - but not in this case.
Basically, it’s something that helps decide what state a game is in, whether that’s a cutscene or a piece of dialogue. In this case, there’s a particular portion of the VVVVVV source code that is sparking discussion due to its sheer messiness. Open source code like this makes it clear that you can successfully ship without that level of perfection.” “I know many developers get bent out of shape trying to make their code perfect. “Games aren’t just an ordinary piece of software, they are a complex beast that require many different disciplines to successfully ship, and often on timelines that require sacrifices to be made,” said game developer James Simpson in an email. Nearly every game developer I’ve ever spoken to says the same thing. “Almost every single game I’ve worked on has shipped at the exact moment that the bits of spit and prayer holding the whole edifice together are on the *brink* of collapse,” wrote game developer James Patton, in a Twitter discussion about game code. There’s a word for games where the code is barely hanging together, with stupid layout, utterly unscaleable fixes and workarounds on top of workarounds. Time and time again, development stories of video games reveal that, because video games have so many different moving parts, from game design to sound, that things often don’t come together until the last possible second - if they come together at all. There’s this misconception that coding is by nature elegant and sophisticated, because after all, it’s kind of like writing logic, isn’t it? Don’t they call it computer SCIENCE for a reason? But the reality is much more complicated than that. Cavanagh maybe foresaw this - in his blog post announcing the release, he admits, “ VVVVVV is not a technically sophisticated game! Even by the standards of self taught indie devs, it’s kind of a mess.” Some of the response to VVVVVV’s source code has been horror, as onlookers pick apart things that could have been written better. This isn’t the sort of thing that happens often, and by that metric alone, the value of releasing this information is immense.
In layman’s terms, this means that the average person can now look at how the game is built, because every line of code can be perused. Last week, Dicey Dungeons creator Terry Cavanagh celebrated the 10th anniversary of an earlier game, VVVVVV, by releasing its source code to the public.
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