nik592 wrote: ↑05 October 2025, 23:48
Strode wrote: ↑05 October 2025, 16:54
It doesn't say what happens if you don't hear from the developer. Does BGA make it easy to pick up where they left off? Regardless, someone with developer skills would be needed, which is a very small percentage of us.
I would assume if you haven't heard from a dev after sometime (having made at least a couple of contact attempts), you could consider them no longer active (or at least not currently active). If they were away for some reason, hopefully someone in the forums (for that game) may know that.
As to how easy it is to pick up, I haven't done so, but any code is only as easy to maintain as the person before you left it. I'm sure some code is super easy to walk into (well-commented/named, logically structured) but some is probably enough to make anyone weep and/or run. I say this as someone who writes code professionally and has seen all aspects, including code written by my younger/less experienced self that makes my current self weep, or at least shake my head in disbelief - it's not always because the dev didn't care or wasn't trying their best, but writing code that works (for your immediate goal) and writing code that's easy to maintain are two entirely different things.
Well said. When I was learning Java, I would submit a project and then be able to see other people's code for the same project. And even though all the posted solutions functioned the same way, other people's code looked like nonsense to me much of the time.
Look no further than Terraforming Mars on [other gaming site] to see how difficult it is even for professionals to walk into someone else's spaghetti code and untangle it.
And, yeah, the more I learned, the more I would look back on my earlier code and shake my head.
(I'm not a professional developer.)
