• February 02, 2025
• 1252 words
• 7 min

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the tools I’ve made, and I have found an insight from game development that I think can apply to the software engineering industry as a whole.

The origin of the insight

I’m working on a hacking simulator, Botnet of Ares and part of the work involves designing and balancing the parameters for the various Exploits that the player can use. For context, these Exploits are kind of equivalent to items in an Role-Playing Game. They have stats similar to “Damage”, “Attack Speed”, “Mana Cost”, except framed in the context of a computer thread performing work – so the rough equivalents in my game would be “Machine Speed”, “Loss Wait Time” & the various “Per Machine” costs, respectively.

This used to be done in a spreadsheet, and the process involved copy-pasting ~10 fields every time I wanted to move something into or out of the game.

At some point I realized that I am spending an eternity staring at spreadsheets and it was just no fun for this sort of task. Furthermore, I was wasting a lot of time copy-pasting things into Godot (the game engine I am using), play-testing, noticing something is wrong, going back to the spreadsheet, editing, copy-pasting again etc. etc. etc.

So I decided to implement my own editor which can save & load directly using the Godot .tscn format. It’s super quick & dirty & not optimized at all, but it’s already made the process of creating content for the game much faster.

All this is is a little editor that lets me input stats for the various exploits, shows a bit of info on the right side about its balance, and then outputs a scene file that can be loaded directly into the game.

What this has made me realize is that speeding up part of a workflow can provide value far beyond the mere time savings: it also unlocks new ways of working that were not possible before. For example, with the Exploit Editor I can go over entire lines of devices and balance them in relation to each other. This used to be incredibly tedious to do with the spreadsheet because of all the tedious copy-pasting required to import from the editor. But now, I can edit dozens of scenes and remai