The Un-Fun Stuff

People who are interested in game programming typically have one or two specific areas that they consider The Fun Stuff. For many, it’s the graphics stuff, trying to figure out how to push more polys, with more detail while maintaining a reasonable framerate. For others, it’s AI, building smarter, nastier opponents for the player to face. There might even be a handful who love nothing more than hacking low level network code, so even a player on a gimpy dial-up connection gets to enjoy the action. But I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered anyone who’s said “I want to get into game programming because I just love figuring out how to serialize data to disk!” or “If only I could get a job dealing with localization code in video games!” Maybe there are a few of you out there, but for most of us, this sort of thing falls under the category of The Un-Fun Stuff. Read more