Don’t optimize!

Actually you should optimize, but not at the wrong places, or for the wrong reasons. But I’ll get back to that in a minute.

I recently released a small XNA-based game together with my friends at Badgerpunch Games, and have been following the indie game development community through forums and twitter. Game developers are very concerned about performance, mostly for good reason. No one wants a game with choppy framerate. Because of all this worrying about performance, there is an array of optimization tips and articles that get passed around to alleviate the problem. The majority of the tips and articles are informative and useful, but hardly any of these articles touch on the main issue of optimization: When not to optimize and why not.

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