Writing Clean Code for Games (Industry Veteran)

Video Description

This is a conversation with Ricard Pillosu, an industry veteran with over 20 years in both AAA and indie teams, currently working as Co-Founder at Epictellers a 30+ head team working on the CRPG Starfinder: Afterlight. Links to my Guests ➤ Starfinder: Afterlight on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/3245640/ ➤ Epictellers Website: https://www.epictellers.com/ Listen to the podcast on the go (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.): ➤ https://tyrollerjonas.podbean.com/ 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 My game "Thronefall": ➤ Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2239150/Thronefall/ ➤ Discord: https://discord.gg/gVYctptyg8 ➤ Nintendo Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Thronefall-2669627.html#Overview My game "Will You Snail": ➤ Play Will You Snail on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1115050/Will_You_Snail/ ➤ Join the Will You Snail Discord: https://discord.gg/G3mRDrK For the game developers among you: ➤ Join our creative game dev community on Discord: https://discord.gg/Ye6zzfQ