Making games

Where game work gets taken apart: effect sandboxes, MMO servers, 3D asset generation, the combat design of shipped action games.

Here the code almost never crosses. Web GLSL doesn’t move to Unity; a Three.js 3D plane doesn’t move to 2D URP. So this bucket gets read differently from the start — not for an implementation, but for a rule that shrinks to one sentence.

One, and that sentence pointed at 43 places in my own code

Elemental Sandbox yielded exactly this:

An ability instance remembers only a seed and ratios. Metres, seconds and radians are recomputed from settings every frame.

That’s why the sliders keep working while the game is paused. No dimension is frozen into the instance, so changing a value mid-flight is simply re-read on the next frame.

My Unity project was built the exact opposite way. yield return new WaitForSeconds(pattern.telegraphTime) freezes the telegraph duration the moment the coroutine starts, so changing the value mid-play never reaches a telegraph already running. Counted across the project: 43 uses of WaitForSeconds against 22 fraction loops.

Not one line of effect code came over, and yet the character of 43 places in my code got decided. That’s the kind of return to expect from this bucket.

Read the licence in two places

The same repository declared MIT in LICENSE and, in the README, said something else: “provided as-is for the purposes of this project.” At the time of reading it was five days old with one contributor.

Treat it as a textbook, not a dependency. Game repos are short-lived, which makes that distinction matter more here than anywhere else.

At five pieces, there were four reasons the code doesn’t cross

At one piece I read it as “different engine.” At five, the place it gets blocked was different every time.

Subject	Where it got blocked	What was left
Elemental Sandbox	different engine, different dimensions	the rule don’t freeze dimensions — it pointed at 43 places in my code
OpenMMO	the licence is non-commercial	the idea of sharing one body of code across runtimes
Hunyuan3D-WorldClaw	there is no code at all	intermediates in an inspectable form · parameterise as a sum of named variables
Dynasty Warriors Origins	a shipped game, so there is no code	duels as a shared see-saw gauge · morale as the deciding statistic for AI combat
Recent Unity releases	it’s release notes, not code	never upgrade a moving version mid-development

Four different blockers and the same outcome — every one of them shrank to a sentence. Which means this bucket should be read not as “the code won’t come across” but as “I go there looking for a sentence in the first place.”

And once, the research deleted an item from the build list

The Dynasty Warriors piece did that. I believed the reward for a perfect dodge was slow motion, so I concluded a time-scale arbiter had to be built first — and cross-checking the sources showed the actual reward is a resource gain, with slow motion confirmed nowhere. A prerequisite vanished whole.

Count the value of benchmarking only as “N things to take” and this line goes missing. Something you no longer have to build is a result too, and it’s the kind that never lands on a list — so it disappears unless you count it deliberately.

The making side lives in MOON Studio. This is the record of taking other people’s games apart; that is what came of it.