Laws of Game Programming

In another lifetime I worked for a couple video game companies; throughout those years I kept a copy of "The Laws of Game Programming" by Ian Parberry hanging on my cube walls. That paper has come with me to various offices since then. Now that we have a tech blog up and running, I can safely transcribe a copy here, and finally clear out yet another piece of scrap paper (it really is just the top torn half of a page). Laws of Game Programming by Ian Parberry (I haven't asked permission to repost it here. Hopefully this is enough proper credit to keep me out of trouble!) 1. Real game programmers aren't afraid of mathematics.
2. Real game programmers never use bubblesort.
3. Real games are coded in C++ with low-level routines in assembly language.
4. Real games have real music written by musicians, and real art drawn by artists.
5. Never optimize a piece of code before its time.
6. Profile before you optimize.
7. If it looks right on the screen, then it is right.
8. If it moves, blit it. If it doesn't move, skip it.
9. Never be afraid to throw code out.
10. Don't go home each day until your game (in whatever state it is in) compiles and runs without crashing.
11. Make a game that even a fool can win and only a fool will want to play it.
12. Fools have money too.
13. At best, graphics libraries can only please some of the people some of the time.
14. Use programmer's art until your game is playable.
15. Artificial intelligence isn't.
16. No matter what you do, your game will appear on the pirate bulletin boards.
It's a neat list, and quite a bit of that info carries over to other forms of development. Enjoy.