A fun and short video from Juniper Dev about how Undertale is a fantastic game despite being fantastically poorly written:

When you make dialogue in a video game you have a distinct file that has all the possible text that can pop up in your game. This is usually a CSV file, or a JSON, and you can think of it as basically a database for text. So then at different parts in your code, you extract specific parts of this file, and that’ll depend on what character you’re talking to, if you have a certain item, whatever, and that’s one of the most efficient and common ways to do it.

But the way that Undertale handles dialogue is much worse. All of the dialogue in the entire game, every text box that pops up, is handled in one massive if statement. […] case 737 out of what must have been at least 1,000 lines.

This reminded me a little of my first week with my personal computer, when I didn’t yet know you can write IF X <> 3 THEN, so I spent half a day writing statements like IF X = 1 OR X = 2 OR X = 4 OR X = 5…

Vibe coding was there long before AI.