Fallout co-creator Timothy Cain wants you to know that unreadable, so-called "spaghetti code" in video games isn't a matter of discipline or genius – developers just never have enough time to do their jobs.
He knows this fact well. The former Interplay developer illustrates in a new YouTube video, with an example, he says, "I'd love to tell you [...] was hypothetical. It's not."
"Let's say you're working on a game. Let's say it's a role-playing game! Hmm," Cain begins, not-hypothetically. "And let's say it mentions DR, damage resistance. Damage resistance is a very simple concept: You get hit. If you have 10% damage resistance, whatever damage that hit is gets reduced by 10%. So if something hits you for 20, 10% of that is two. You only take 18 [damage]."
To account for the fact that design specifications indicate DR is part of the single armor piece you wear, Cain says that "he," the game's programmer "writes a function called 'item armor get DR.' I'm using 'he' because this was me."
"'Item armor get DR' looks at what armor they're wearing – that one piece of armor they're wearing – gets the DR off it, and returns it," Cain continues. "OK, so all that's written. It's really great, it's beautiful, it's flawless code. It's a diamond. Ooh, a change comes in." Then another, and another…
"Wait, another change comes in," says Cain. "But wait, suddenly the inventory UI designer comes to you and says, 'Why is the UI wrong in the inventory?' and you're like, 'Oh, that's the additional value from status effects.' And the inventory UI designer is like, 'I don't want that. I never told you to do that, you stupid lazy programmer!'"
"Basically this is where spaghetti-fication begins," Cain concludes. "What I'm trying to point out here, this is the thing that I've always had to explain to everybody since the beginning in the '80s to now: games are not products. They are as much art as they are product."
Fallout co-creator is glad his RPGs are remembered as "flawed masterpieces" rather than "very buggy games," but warns devs that adding more features will always make other parts of their games worse.
