Quite a strange title, isn’t it? It sounds like a riddle, but it’s reality. Sometimes your lead programmer doesn’t let you edit the gun shooting script, but you want to add a cool feature as you churn out level after level. 

So what do you do?

I hail back to the source engine modding community, a bunch of bright blokes with even brighter little light bulbs over their heads lighting up as they come up with clever ideas. Clever ideas like “If I make a helicopter invisible and throw some blocks on it, I can use it as a mech enemy!” and “I can put invisible props in a tornado to push the player around like spooky ghosts!”. This genius skillset, accrued over years of bullshitting together barely functional mods, actually does indeed have its place in proper game development.

So, I sit here in the dark of my room, sipping disgusting caffeine soft drinks designed to hype me up like a bat on cocaine. I sit here and I think to myself, as Shodanon threatens me for even looking at his code wrong, and I notice that the door entity he graciously made has … a health bar.

Have you heard of the concept of an abomination, friend? A sin against God, creating that which is unholy. Like Saddam’s blood Quran, an artifact that is both indestructible and sin, I shoved that door entity onto a barrel and wrote a parasitic script that is triggered when it’s at 0 health. Then it makes it explode.

And it works too, beautifully so! That lovely “door” launches itself into orbit, and launches you with it, ending your pathetic cybernetically enhanced life. And because it works, other terribly sinful development ideas follow.

If a barrel can be a door, why wouldn’t a sliding door not be an elevator? And if an elevator is a door, can it not be a train also? This is efficiency, you may not like it, but it’s true.