Writing Clean Code for Games (Industry Veteran)

0:00 Intro 1:21 Why Big Success Can Be Dangerous 3:31 Luck Is 70% 6:13 The Hardest Part of Building a Studio: People 7:57 Ric’s Journey so Far 9:45 Becoming a Lead and Manager 12:30 How Does AAA Build Games? 16:02 Prototyping Rituals in AAA 18:29 Pre-Production and Messy Realities 20:41 Scrum Era, Sub-Teams, and the Human Factor 22:50 Charisma, Toxic Positivity, and Milestone Negotiations 26:51 Reputation Traps in Big Teams 29:19 Is Experience Overrated? 30:56 Culture Clashes and the Timeline Fallacy 32:49 Wisdom Over Experience 39:12 Choose Simple Solutions 41:55 Enforcing Pipelines 42:26 From Overengineering to Readability 46:24 When Copying Is Okay 47:18 Don’t Pre-Architect 49:18 Pick Patterns Per Problem 54:16 Be Nice to the CPU 55:45 Why Godot? 58:40 Signals, Call Stacks, and Deferring Work to the Frame 1:00:37 Queues and Frame-Slicing 1:02:43 Start From the Game: Feature Wishlists 1:04:24 Why Decoupling Matters 1:05:46 Turn Manager Example: Building Layer 0 1:12:06 Layer 1 Orchestration: Game States and Combat Manager 1:14:18 Syntactic Compression 1:17:47 Micro-Managers: Mouse and Targeting Systems 1:20:48 What Makes a Great Gameplay Programmer 1:22:56 Anti-Patterns: Ego, Overcomplication, Blame 1:24:39 Coding Into a Corner: It’s Part of the Journey 1:28:49 Jonas’s Background and Goals 1:31:18 Coding Mastery vs Commercial Success 1:34:02 Path to Mastery: New Engines, Teams, and Contexts 1:35:22 Reuse and Scalability Myths 1:36:10 Why Build Multiple CRPGs: What Really Transfers 1:37:48 Boredom and Scope Creep 1:41:42 Why Second Games Take Longer 1:42:53 Everyone Should Build an Engine 1:48:20 Why Unity/Unreal Feel Bloated 1:50:49 Godot’s Incentives: Smaller, Developer-First 1:52:11 Will Godot Grow? “Fighting the Engine” Metric 1:56:41 When to Pick Godot, Unity, or Unreal 1:57:05 Closing Thoughts