Narbacular Drop Technical Design Document [pdf]

Coding guidelines<p>- Precompute whenever even remotely possible.<p>- Measures must be taken to prevent copy paste errors.<p>- Measures must be taken to prevent copy paste errors.<p>- The STL is evil (most of the time).<p>- Unnecessarily virtual functions should be rewritten to remove virtual requirements.<p>- Sloppy code must be marked for recoding later.<p>- Unreadable code earns you a free punch in the face.<p>- Measures must be taken to prevent copy paste errors.

For those that aren&#x27;t aware, the dev team for this was later hired by Valve and created Portal.

&quot;RECODE&quot;, ha, cute.<p>Short and to the point, it&#x27;s a good doc but not very interesting. Just glad they didn&#x27;t pad it with tons of code (last I remember Digipen TDD&#x27;s are required as part of the curriculum and students are known for doing this).<p>Haven&#x27;t thought about this game in years, though. What a nice throwback. I thought Portal was great, very polished with great sense of humor but ND was in my opinion a much more fun and interesting game experience (the puzzles really gave you that fantastic &quot;aha!&quot; moment).

Nice piece of history, and hilariously&#x2F;sweetly innocent&#x2F;naive in its specificity and certainty, like only newbies&#x27; first &quot;design document&quot; could be.

For those who haven&#x27;t played it, the original game is here:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nuclearmonkeysoftware.com&#x2F;narbaculardrop.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nuclearmonkeysoftware.com&#x2F;narbaculardrop.html</a>

Too bad there&#x27;s nothing about handling recursion of the portal rendering.

Very cool. Are there similar documents available for any other games that we would be familiar with?<p>I imagine it could be a pretty interesting exercise to read over a handful of these from different teams.