Hi,

I have a question regarding Handmade hero series. Has anyone watched/went through all the videos or most of them. I am trying to determine if downloading the code and following along will be beneficial or trying something on my own on the side and treating the series as a reference would be better.

I understand its not a finished game so at some point someone will have to branch out to do their thing.

Kind regards,

I followed and coded along until episode 100 (I had already been programming for several years before that). I suggest that if you follow the series, you code along and not just watch the episodes/codes. It takes a lot of time but you learn a lot more by really figuring stuff out.

It was well worth it in my opinion, to figure out a better way of solving problems and "de-programming" my brain about all the object oriented programming I was learnt in college. After that I still watched the series but without coding along as it was really time consuming and started to work on my own projects.

Sounds like a good plan, thanks

I respectfully disagree. I felt that it was pretty difficult for me to follow along with the series because I was not the one actually writing the code, I was just coding along with Casey. One thing that I see a lot of people recommending handmade hero for is the ability to see a developer go through the process of reading documentation and the prototype and refinement process when structuring parts of the application. I believe this is ironic because prototyping parts of a program and eventually refining these parts is healthy for every programmer to go through, but coding along with Casey just makes you copy his mistakes and refinements, not figuring it out on your own. That being said, Casey is a much more experienced programmer than me and there is a lot of useful information in handmade hero. So for me I found that using handmade hero more as a resource than a guide has been the most beneficial for me because in my learning journey I much prefer to read the documentation and figure things out myself.

Yea treating the series as a resource or reference is not a bad idea also, but sometimes you don't know what you don't know and I think there is a value to watching it if you follow along, and by following along I mean you try to go beyond or try to implement something before or after the video on your own so you can learn something new and figure out solutions to new problems yourself.

I personally plan to work on my own projects, but from time to time I will watch a video or two, code along, then code more after the video like few hours every week.

Yeah I was mainly replying to the idea of strictly coding what Casey does, which I know is what some people do. But I think what you describe doing is awesome, personally I liked following along and making a Linux x11 platform or Mac platform layer following the same structure. That Casey does.

I watched all the episodes and I can't even begin to describe how awesome of a journey it has been (and it's not over yet). At first, I didn't plan to watch 600+ videos, so I watched some episodes here and there, but I was like "what is this thing, what is he talking about?" and so I decided to start from the beginning. After a few dozen episodes, I started to really, like really enjoy the show so I watched not only to learn, but also because I liked it.

I don't know what is the most efficient way to watch Handmade Hero but personally I didn't code while watching the episodes, I was watching them in the evening, and in the day I worked on my projects that was related to game engine programming, so I could apply the concepts of the series in my projects, but only the concepts themselves, I didn't copy-paste his code. Still, it was useful sometimes to have access to the source code to remind myself how he did some things.

After some hundred episodes, he gets into more specific stuff related to his own game, so it became less "useful" for me since I was not programming the same thing, but it was still enjoyable to watch.

There are some "blackboard" episodes that are self-contained so they are very valuable even if we didn't watch everything.

One downside of watching Handmade Hero though (at least for me) is that now, I'm infuriated every time I see "modern C++ peeps" that don't know what they're doing, or at least spend way too much time on theoric stuff that has nothing to do with actual problem solving. And they use STL and dynamic allocations all over the place, and their thing is slow and buggy... I try to ignore that and convince myself that the modern style can be beneficial, but I'm not there yet. The excuse parade still irritates me ;-;

That is awesome, thanks for sharing.