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Test Driven Development and Games

Started by KingofNoobs Nov 24, 2012 at 8:45 PM 1 replies 2.1k views

Original Post

Nov 24, 2012 at 8:45 PM

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone could throw their two cents at me about whether it is worth it to invest my time learning about unit testing and test driven development. The thought occurred to me that perhaps these strategies were not practiced in the game industry, and that individual indies such as myself need not worry about. I was wondering if you could confirm or deny this. If unit testing and test driven development are two concepts that are worth the investment in a long term sense, then I will learn them. If not, I will write a game.

What do you think?

-Dave Ottley

SiCrane

Nov 24, 2012 at 10:16 PM

Unsurprisingly, this has been asked before. One of the better threads is this one, in particular frob's first response is pretty helpful.

frob

Nov 24, 2012 at 10:41 PM

I was wondering if anyone could throw their two cents at me about whether it is worth it to invest my time learning about unit testing and test driven development. The thought occurred to me that perhaps these strategies were not practiced in the game industry, and that individual indies such as myself need not worry about. I was wondering if you could confirm or deny this. If unit testing and test driven development are two concepts that are worth the investment in a long term sense, then I will learn them. If not, I will write a game.

If you want to learn it, then learn it. If you don't want to learn it, then don't.

TDD is not a difficult thing. You learn to write about ten lines of code, then a 1:1 test-to-development ratio after that. Learning the practice is very easy, you can get started with just an hour or so of effort.

The Tetris TDD example was already linked to above, I recommend it. It takes about 2 hours, less if you are already experienced.

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