Posted October 15, 2024 by Anthuulos
#TheBigRefactoring #DevDiary #Intro
Hello everyone!
And welcome to this first chapter of my adventures as Town Alight’s main coder. This is the first of many diary entries in which I’ll explain to you many of the big changes we’ve had in Town Alight since we published its first version. After publishing each entry, I’ll answer any questions you have about Town Alight’s development; remember, we’re always open to feedback.
The first diary in this series is called “The Big Refactoring.” While we have big plans to expand Town Alight, we encountered many issues with how the Game Jam version of the game was working behind the scenes. We wanted to improve its performance and readability, so this became our first priority before even beginning to implement new features. You may ask: “Why didn’t you develop it well in the first place?!” First of all, how dare you?! Second of all… you’re completely right; but there were a few reasons:
So, here we are. Many months later, looking in horror at my old code, wanting to erase everything and start from scratch. But I won’t! Instead, I’m going to show you what changes were made to the game to optimize many of its processes. In the first chapter, I’m going to discuss something both Doops and I ended up hating: making the whole game based on tiles without room for more complex behaviors.
I hope you like this series, and I’ll see you soon in the first chapter of The Big Refactoring!
- Anthuulos