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Dirty Coding Tricks To Make a Deadline
Gamasutra is running an article with a collection of anecdotes from game developers who had to employ some quick and dirty fixes to get their products to ship on time. Here's a brief excerpt:
"Back at [company X] — I think it was near the end of [the project] — we had an object in one of the levels that needed to be hidden. We didn't want to re-export the level and we did not use checksum names. So right smack in the middle of the engine code we had something like the following. The game shipped with this in: if( level == 10 && object == 56 ) {HideObject();} Maybe a year later, an artist using our engine came to us very frustrated about why an object in their level was not showing up after exporting to what resolved to level 10. I wonder why?"
Have you ever needed to insert terrible code to make something work at the last minute?
In the real world there are deadlines, and it's entirely the developer's responsibility to be able to meet those deadlines without using such "dirty coding tricks". Good developers should have tested their code so as to not have serious problems to fix at the last minute, and designed it so as to be able to extend it easily.
Yes, because deadlines are always reasonable and never pushed up. And change orders are a myth.
Nope. Deadlines are often unreasonable. Welcome to the real world. But as a good software developer, you should be able to cope with that too, and without last-minute hide-the-problem hacks.