Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!

"If the code works, why does clean code matter?"

This is probably the most common argument I hear against clean code. And honestly, if you’re making a tiny one-day prototypes, maybe yeah it doesn't matter much since the project is too small to cause problems. But the longer the project goes, the more important it becomes!

The real question is not "does the code work today?"

The real question is "will the code still work after I add 20 new features?"

Messy code is fine when the project is tiny because you can keep everything in your head. Even if you are a beginner it’s not hard to keep 10 classes and 100 lines of code in your head. But as soon as the game grows, that stops being possible, you cannot keep a mental model of 1000 classes and 10,000 lines of code. On that scale, every new feature becomes slower to build. Every bug becomes harder to track. Every change creates fear because you don’t know what you might break.

That's when the project starts falling apart and that's when people usually quit and the project ends up as yet another one in the folder titled "AbandonedProjects"

Clean code is not about making your code pretty! Instead it’s about making sure you can keep working on the game tomorrow, next week, and 6 months from now and actually release it! Disposable prototypes can get away with anything but finished games need maintainable code.

So if you want to actually finish and release your games, I highly recommend you focus on writing the best quality code you can write.

Check out my talk on YouTube titled: "How to Write High Quality Code that doesn't fall apart" In this talk I cover a very detailed overview of what clean code is (and what isn’t) as well as some very practical guides for how you can write better code that enables you to build better games and actually finish them.

Thanks for reading! Best of luck in your game dev journey!