I got into professional game development in the last few years and found that the state of good, modern software engineering practices in the game world is years behind, say, web engineering.
Games are still all closed source. Game engineers prefer to sell their components for a pittance (for example, on the Unity Asset Store) instead of collaborating on GitHub. They really, really hate writing tests. There's a deep reliance on manual testing. They still have a "ship" culture ("who cares about the code, as long as we ship by the deadline?"), disregarding the fact that games run live for years now. Multiple managers actively fought me on doing code reviews (I was new-ish, I wanted my code to be reviewed). I saw and worked on games that had no codified version control branching strategy. No coding standards. Multiple issue tracking systems. A pathetic grip on sharing code among projects. Four implementations of a state machine in one game. It goes on.
I'd like to think it was just my employer's problem, but from talking to people who have been in games for a long time, it's endemic to the industry.
I still remember suggesting code reviews to my dev manager in 2003-ish. He didn't know what they were, and scheduled a meeting where he could review my performance, instead. Awkward.
Games are still all closed source. Game engineers prefer to sell their components for a pittance (for example, on the Unity Asset Store) instead of collaborating on GitHub. They really, really hate writing tests. There's a deep reliance on manual testing. They still have a "ship" culture ("who cares about the code, as long as we ship by the deadline?"), disregarding the fact that games run live for years now. Multiple managers actively fought me on doing code reviews (I was new-ish, I wanted my code to be reviewed). I saw and worked on games that had no codified version control branching strategy. No coding standards. Multiple issue tracking systems. A pathetic grip on sharing code among projects. Four implementations of a state machine in one game. It goes on.
I'd like to think it was just my employer's problem, but from talking to people who have been in games for a long time, it's endemic to the industry.
I'm now out of the industry :)