Fixed / Variable Content

We have some content that is fixed throughout game play, and some that varies. We’re getting close to needing to handle that. Perilously close. Yesterday we wired in a simple “treasure”. I want to talk about that a bit, because it is a characteristic way that I work. In a word, well, two, that way is Very Incrementally. In my many decades of programming, I have studied many of the masterworks on software design, and have tried a major fraction of what they advise. For most of my career, the common element seemed to be to design first, then implement the design. Whenever that approach went wrong, and it frequently did, the same refrain always appeared: You didn’t design enough. You didn’t really do what we said.1 I believe it was Kent Beck who first said, in my hearing, that we should let the code participate in the design. I may have misinterpreted that advice, as I have done with so much advice, but what thinking about that has led me to s Something Like This We need a new feature,…