Binge Watching Handmade Hero

For the last several weeks I’ve been obsessed with one TV show. It’s changed my viewing habits, my buying habits, and my computing habits. Technically it’s not even a “TV show” (if your definition of that term doesn’t include content created by non-professionals that is only available for free over the Internet).

But for me, a more or less typical Gen-Xer, Handmade Hero by game tool developer Casey Muratori has me totally enthralled  as only must see TV can enthrall. I’m hooked and I simply must watch all 256+ episodes of Handmade Hero before I die (in about 1,406  Saturdays  according to the How Many Saturdays app).

So first off let me explain a few things. Unless you are an aspiring retro  game programmer or aging C/C++ programmer Handmade Hero will seem tedious  at best and irrelevant at worst. There are much better and more modern ways to make a video game (like SpriteKit on iOS or Unity on any OS) but Casey  promises to demonstrate live on Twitch.TV how to write a complete video game from scratch, without modern  frameworks, that will run on almost anything with a CPU. He’s starting with Windows but promises Mac OS X, Linux, and Raspberry Pi.

This is a bold promise! When I first heard of Handmade hero, almost 2 years ago I ignored it. I didn’t know who Casey Muratori was and the Internet is littered with hundreds  of these solo projects that tend to fissile out like ignobly  failed Kickstarter projects.

But a comment in Hacker News caught my eye about a month ago. Casey  had delivered hundreds of hours of live coding with explanations of arcane C, Windows, and video programming techniques! It’s all archived on YouTube  and he’s still steaming almost every night! Awesomesause!

So I had to check it out. I started with Casey’s first video, Intro to C on Windows, and ate it up. I had to pound through the rest of that week’s archive. Because I have a family and a very demand job and kids and cats I had to purchase a subscription to YouTube Red so that I could watch  Casey’s videos on or offline. Google is getting $10 bucks a month off me of because of Casey!

My keyboarding fingers ached to follow along coding as Casey coded. I used to be a C/C++ programmer. I used to do pointer arithmetic and #DEFINEs  and even Win32 development! Could I too write a video game from scratch with no frameworks? I had to buy a Windows laptop and find out! Thus Dell got me to buy a refurbished XPS 13 because of Casey!

Even Microsoft benefited. I subscribed to Office 365 for OneDrive so I could easily backup my files and use the Office apps since I’m keeping my MacBook Pro at the office these days. I have discovered that a Windows PC does almost everything a MacBook does because of Casey!

I usually have less than an hour a day to watch TV so I’ve had to optimize my entertainment and computing environment around Handmade hero because at this rate I will never catch up to the live stream! But I’m having a blast and learning deep insights from a journeyman coder.

What could an old school  game coder teach an old battle-scared  industry vet  like me? More than I could have imagined.

First of call Casey is an opinionated software developer with a narrow focus and an idiosyncratic coding style. He is not wasting his time following the endless trends of modern coding. He is not worried about which new JavaScript dialect he is going master this month or which new isometric web framework he is going wrestle with. He codes in C with some C++ extensions, he uses Emacs as his editor, he builds with batch files, and debugs with VisualStudio. While these tools have changed over the years Casey has not. He is nothing if not focused.

Thus Casey is a master of extemporaneous coding while  explaining–the kind that every software engineer fears during Google and Facebook interviews. This means Casey has his coding skills down cold. He is unflappable.

Casey doesn’t know everything and his technique  for searching MSDN while writing code shows how fancy IDEs with auto-completion are actually bad for us developers. He uses the Internet (and Google search) not as a crutch to copy and paste code but as a tool to dig deep into how APIs and compilers actually work.  There seems to be nothing Casey can’t code himself.

Casey makes mistakes and correct himself. He writes // Notes and // TODOs in his code to follow up with as if he is working with team. Casey interacts with his audience at the end of every stream and is not shy about either dismissing their questions or embracing them. Casey is becoming a better, more knowledgeable programming before our eyes and we’re helping him while he is helping us.

Casey is not cool or suave on camera. He swigs almond milk and walks away off  screen to get stuff during the stream. But nothing about Handmade Hero would be substantially improved if Casey hired a professional video production team. In point of fact, any move away from his amateur  production values would be met with suspicion from his audience. Any inorganic product placement would fail. Dell, Microsoft, and Google should support him but stay the heck away least they burst the bubble of pure peer-to-peer show-and-tell that surrounds Casey.

I have 249 videos go to (and Casey has not stopped making videos)! I still don’t know if he delivers on his promise and creates an actual video game from scratch. (Please! No spoilers!) But I already know far more than I did about real-world game development where the gritty reality of incompatible file systems and operating platform nuances make Object Oriented Programming and interpreted bytecode luxuries a working developer can’t afford.