My Program is Scattered to the Stars

A few people have asked me what ‘s different about the games industry these days. That could take a book to answer, but one of the big differences I’ve noticed is the basic structure of programs.

When I wrote an 8-bit or 16-bit game the program followed a nice sequence, running like a flowchart from top to bottom. These days there are little bits of code all over the shop (maybe even on different machines in different continents) that get called when certain conditions are met. Which means you have to be careful about changing any data, in case another bit of code is doing the same thing in another universe.