ABSTRACT
When I first started making games, I would approach development on a project-to-project basis, recoding and rebuilding everything from scratch each time. As I became a professional developer, landing a job at a game development studio making browser-based games, I was lucky enough to work with a guy who was innovating the scene. He was a master at turning out great games (both visually and gameplay-wise) very quickly. One secret to his success lay in the development of a reusable framework that could easily be refactored to use on all of his projects. His framework was set up to deal with server communication, input handling, browser communication, and UI among other things, saving an incredible amount of time in putting together all of the essentials. By reusing the framework, it allowed more time for him and his team to concentrate on great gameplay and graphics optimization, resulting in games that, at the time, blew the competition away. Of course, the structure was tailored to how he worked (he did build it, after all), and it took me a while to get to grips with his style of development; but once I did, it really opened my eyes. From then on, I used the framework for every project and even taught other programmers how to go about using it. Development time was substantially reduced, which left more time to concentrate on making better games.
