Adding standards and discipline to game making, how do you approach it?

Ace_Dragon

I start this thread because as of recent weeks, I realized that my standards and general discipline in game design has been a bit on the sloppy side. What I mean is I had a tenuous concept of making sure things like code-style and scene layout paradigms were consistent game-wide. This was an issue I had for around 15 years of tinkering with 3D games (since wading into the BGE with Blender 2.33), especially with things like variable naming and whatnot.

So I started to set out making the code design language more consistent across all of the logic in the projects I currently have in Godot. In addition, I started to create distinctions between when a scene would inherit from a Blender asset (general instanced game objects) and when the Blender asset would be added and edited through editable children (the actual levels).

Variable naming though would need some more thought. I now wonder what kind of standards you guys have instituted or are desiring to institute to make your game creation more logical and easier to follow, what are they?

TwistedTwigleg

For me it depends.

When I am working on short personal projects for fun, I don’t worry too much about adhering to a standard as long as I understand what is going on. For almost every other project, I try to follow my a standard (generally my personal standard) as much as possible without being overly strict/draconian about it.

For code, I generally don’t worry too much about style and standards when I’m writing code initially. I try to get it working before worrying about the style. Once the code is working I generally will go back and refactor the code, clean it up, and rename everything so it is consistent. Especially if it is not a personal project, I do my best to give the entire thing a refactoring/renaming pass to make it consistent with the project standard and/or style.

If I am starting the project and/or setting the style, I generally use Function_Name_Here for functions, and variable_name_here for variables across all of the programming languages I work in. Likewise, I try to name the scenes/nodes/resources with a consistent style as well, generally Node_Name_Here In Godot due to nodes using capitalized names by default.

Using the same style everywhere works for me and I have found it makes it easier for me to adhere and stay consistent in all the projects. That said, I have not always held this opinion and before I used to adhere to whatever the official/most-popular style guild for the language was. Even now I will occasionally make exceptions depending on the scenario.

Ultimately, I think the most important part is finding what works best for you and trying to adhere to it as much as possible without driving yourself crazy. :smile:

Calinou

In addition to the official GDScript style guide, GDquest has published a set of GDScript best practices which may be of interest.

emo10001

@Calinou said: In addition to the official GDScript style guide, GDquest has published a set of GDScript best practices which may be of interest.

Nice! I'll definitely watch the GDQuest video.

In the "real" world, I try to keep my personal "best practices" going as I'm developing. I'm not always great at it, but if I notice that my code looks sloppy, I try to fix as I go to avoid having to go back and refactor an entire project. (My real job is SQL developer, so lots of TSQL, heavy Powershell and some light Python scripting). I try to bring those standards into my GD scripting. Even things as keeping all variable declared at the top of the script. I usually follow that with all functions...then anything else below that.

-emo