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My Worst Code

Someone called Xeomorpher made a thread on the Open Redstone Engineers forum (more about ORE some here), asking what people's worst pieces of code were. I wrote a response, which I might as well post here too:

TequilaJumper!

Made for Ludum Dare with minimal amounts of experience, it's not of my prettiest of works. It did however spawn some offspring in the form of xeo's TofuJumper.

Because of open sourceness, the source code can be found here: https://github.com/mortie/tequilaJumper

So, let's have a look at it shall we?

You don't even have to look at any of the source code to find the first horrible decision. Everything in one file. One index.html, containing almost 800 lines of source code. Yeeah.

Opening the file, we see some disastrous code. Take for instance this draw code: [line 218]

gameCtx.fillStyle = "rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5";
gameCtx.beginPath();
gameCtx.moveTo(Math.floor(platformStartX[i] + platformWidth[i]/2), Math.floor(drawYModifier(platformStartY[i] + platformHeight[i]/2, 0))); 
gameCtx.lineTo(Math.floor(platformEndX[i] + platformWidth[i]/2), Math.floor(drawYModifier(platformEndY[i] + platformHeight[i]/2, 0)));
gameCtx.stroke();

Beautiful, right? That was the code for drawing lines marking the path of moving platforms (play the game for yourself, and you'll see what I mean).

This one-liner is quite extraordinary too: [line 271]

gameCtx.fillRect (Math.floor(platformX[i]), Math.floor(drawYModifier(platformY[i], platformHeight[i])), Math.floor(platformWidth[i]), Math.floor(platformHeight[i]));

Yeeah, that's one line. Believe it or not.

In the code for handling the movement of platforms (which is a complex mess of work too by the way, starting at line 283 and ending at 349): [line 324]

//HAAAAAACK!
platformMovementInvertedX[i] = platformMovementInvertedY[i];

Encountered a bug I didn't manage to fix, so I simply hacked my way around it using an extremely dirty trick.

Another thing, which isn't as clearly expressed in the code, but maybe is worst of them all:

When a platform is disappearing off of the screen, it doesn't really disappear. It's still stored in memory - it doesn't get overwritten by new platforms. This leads to a horrible memory leak. That's right. Platforms never despawn.

That's a selection of the worst parts of the code. Other ineresting areas are:

Oh, and I almost forgot:

Almost all variables are global. Just look at the variable declaration part [line 7-73] :S

In my defence, it was made for Ludum Dare, AND I attended a party which took most of my weekend. The time was therefore short. It also kinda feels wonderful to hack away on code, not spending a single thought on structure, and just see where you end up. The code becomes extremely horrible and unreadable, but it's rather fun :P

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