Building Self-Managed Teams: A Case Study from Riot Games

Re:Building Self-Managed Teams: A Case Study from Riot Games by danbolt on Thursday May 20, 2021 @01:49AM (#27217874)

I don’t know much about League of Legends or its architecture, but I could imagine they were making tradeoffs at times for the product’s sake. I think they hint at this with `std::string` usage in their tech debt article. [1]

It’s been said to death at this point, but technical shortcomings can be orthogonal to a video game’s success on the market.

[1] https://technology.riotgames.com/news/taxonomy-tech-debt

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Building Self-Managed Teams: A Case Study from Riot Games by bskrobisz on Thursday May 20, 2021 @04:30AM (#27218774)

As a prime example of this, I'd point to the horrifying source for VVVVVV, a darling indie game of its time:

https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/vvvvvv (my favorite piece: https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/master/desktop_...)

(There was also discussion about it on HN before as well, if one is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22011358)

That said, refactoring for later gains might be wasted time if you have only a certain amount of scope planned for the rest of time, counter to the typical heuristic.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Building Self-Managed Teams: A Case Study from Riot Games by hn8788 on Thursday May 20, 2021 @07:05AM (#27219650)

Some of their decisions didn't make any sense, even at the time. For example, each champion is coded separately for each team, there isn't just a single champion where they toggle a flag or something. That's led to bugs where champions are stronger depending on what team they're on. Skins work the same way; instead of just changing the appearance, every skin is a seperate hero in the code.

[ Parent | on HN ]