Niklas Gray

Recently I’ve been trying to help our interns with API design and I figured I should write something about it.

If I have expertise in anything, it’s probably API design. This is kind of frustrating because it is not very tangible. Like if someone is good at optimizing microcode for x86 processors or something like that, you can point to it and say look, this is what she’s good at. But API design is so much fuzzier. What even is a good API?

One thing that has really benefited my productivity (and also my general sanity), has been learning how to take a big task and break it down into smaller, more manageable steps. Big tasks can be frightening and overwhelming, but if I just keep working on the list of smaller tasks, then somehow, as if by magic, the big task gets completed.

Most game engines have some way of creating reusable entities — i.e., template entities that can be placed multiple times in different levels. Sometimes, these templates are called prefabs.