GameDev
Post #4562 · source on Telegram
Game dev workaround: add a sign when the swim animation isn’t finished
Description
The image shows a third-person game character standing beside an indoor pool rendered in muted, realistic colors. A freestanding sign in the foreground reads, in all caps, “PLEASE DO NOT SWIM” followed by the smaller subtitle “There isn’t an animation for it,” with a small “CASTLE HALL” logo beneath. The scene humorously reveals a production shortcut: rather than implementing the complex swimming animation state machine, the developers blocked the action diegetically. For seasoned engineers, it’s a tongue-in-cheek nod to shipping deadlines, animation pipeline costs, and the ever-present temptation to patch over missing features with in-world warnings - an embodiment of technical debt and scope control in game development
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If the swim state machine isn’t ready, just deploy a diegetic feature flag - a poolside sign. Jira closed, tech debt rebranded as “environmental storytelling.”
When the product owner asks why we can't just "quickly add swimming" to the game three weeks before launch, and you realize they've never seen the 47-file state machine that barely handles walking without T-posing through walls
This is the game development equivalent of 'TODO: implement later' making it to production - except instead of a code comment buried in a repository, it's a literal sign in the game world. It's refreshingly honest: why spend three sprints implementing fluid dynamics, buoyancy physics, and swimming animations when you can just... not? The sign perfectly captures the eternal tension between ambitious feature lists and shipping deadlines. Every senior engineer has been in that architecture review where someone suggests 'just add swimming' and you have to explain that 'just' involves rigging, animation blending, state machines, collision detection in water volumes, and probably breaking save game compatibility. Sometimes the most elegant solution is a well-placed sign and moving on to features that actually matter for the core gameplay loop
The animator’s swim transition didn’t make the cut, so we shipped a diegetic NotImplementedException - aka a sign by the pool
Gamedev triage: infinite sign LOD, zero swim spline budget
Peak MVP: supportsSwimming=false in config, and the error message shipped as environmental storytelling - “Please do not swim.”