Difficulties of Game Architecture
Why game projects devolve into unmaintainable chaos - and why it's not because game developers are bad engineers.
Why Games Are Especially Vulnerable
Most software has architectural problems. Games have architectural catastrophes. There are specific reasons why game projects deteriorate faster and more completely than typical software - and understanding these reasons is the first step toward avoiding them.
The Prototype That Became the Product
Almost every game begins as a prototype. Someone wires up a quick demo to test a mechanic, prove a concept, or build a vertical slice for funding. The code is intentionally rough. Architecture is irrelevant - speed matters.
Then the prototype works. The publisher says yes. The team grows. And the prototype code doesn’t get replaced - it gets extended. What was supposed to be throwaway becomes the foundation.
This is not unique to games, but games make it worse because prototyping is culturally celebrated. “Move fast, iterate quickly” is a virtue in game design. The problem isn’t the prototyping - it’s the failure to recognize when the prototype phase ends and the production phase begins. That transition almost never comes with an architectural reset.
The 60fps Ultimatum
Games must hit a steady framerate, and that pressure forces hard choices. When performance is on the line, sacrificing architecture for raw performance is often the first instinct.
That instinct is understandable - but usually misdirected. Performance-critical code does exist in games, but it’s a much smaller fraction of your codebase than most developers assume. The vast majority of game logic - the rules, the state transitions, the progression systems - is not performance-critical. It’s correctness-critical. And correctness is exactly what clean architecture optimizes for.
For the genuine hot paths - projectile systems, pathfinding, spatial queries - the answer is not to abandon architecture. It’s Data-Oriented Design behind a clean interface: Core defines the contract, and a high-performance Service implementation handles the tight loop. The architecture boundary becomes the optimization boundary. This deserves a full treatment - see The Performance Dilemma.
Everything Talks to Everything
A game is a simulation where everything is interconnected. The player picks up an item, which affects the inventory, which triggers a quest update, which changes the UI, which plays a sound, which sends an analytics event, which might trigger a tutorial tooltip.
In most business software, you can draw relatively clean boundaries. A payment service talks to a payment gateway. A user service talks to a database. The boundaries are obvious.
In a game, the boundaries are not obvious. The temptation is to let the item system talk directly to the quest system, the quest system directly to the UI, and the UI directly to the audio. Each individual shortcut seems harmless. In aggregate, they create a web where nothing can be changed in isolation.
This is the “Big Ball of Mud” - and games are uniquely predisposed to it because the domain itself is heavily interconnected. Clean architecture doesn’t deny this interconnection - it structures it through events and use case interfaces, so that connections happen through controlled channels rather than direct coupling.
The Engine as the Center of the Universe
Game engines are extraordinary tools. They handle rendering, physics, input, audio, asset management, scene graphs, and a hundred other concerns that would take years to build from scratch.
The trap is that engines also impose an architectural worldview. In Unity, the fundamental unit is a MonoBehaviour attached to a GameObject. In Unreal, it’s an Actor with Components. These patterns encourage you to put logic inside engine objects - to write your game rules as MonoBehaviour methods or Blueprint scripts.
This works for small projects. For anything substantial, it means your game logic is inseparable from the engine. You can’t test it without launching the engine. You can’t reason about it without understanding the engine’s lifecycle. You can’t replace or refactor a subsystem without fighting the engine’s assumptions.
The engine should serve your game, not the other way around. In Clean Game Architecture, the engine lives in the outermost layer - an adapter that renders the state your Core produces. Your game logic doesn’t know or care which engine is running it. (See: Architecture Model)
The Seduction of Quick Fixes
Game development has intense deadline pressure. Milestones, vertical slices, publisher demos, Early Access launches, seasonal content updates - there is always a next deadline.
Under this pressure, architecture feels like a luxury. “We’ll clean it up after launch” is the most common lie in game development. The quick fix - the direct reference, the hardcoded dependency, the Manager class that does everything - is always faster today.
The compounding cost is invisible until it’s catastrophic. Each shortcut makes the next shortcut slightly more necessary. Each tight coupling makes refactoring slightly harder. The codebase gradually shifts from “fast to work in” to “terrifying to touch.” By the time the team notices, the cost of repair exceeds the cost of the original shortcut by orders of magnitude.
The Manager Epidemic
When a game project has no architectural structure, a predictable pattern emerges: Manager classes. GameManager. AudioManager. UIManager. EnemyManager. LevelManager.
These classes start small and grow into god objects - single points that coordinate everything in their domain. The GameManager knows about the player, the level, the UI, the audio, the save system, and the network. Every system in the game holds a reference to it. Changing anything means understanding everything.
This pattern is so pervasive in game development that it deserves its own detailed analysis. See: The Singleton Anti-Pattern.
The “Games Are Different” Myth
Perhaps the most insidious pitfall is the belief that games are fundamentally different from other software and therefore don’t need architecture.
The argument goes: “Games are creative, real-time, performance-critical, iterative. Clean Architecture is for boring enterprise apps. We need flexibility, not rigidity.”
This is a misunderstanding of both games and architecture. Clean Architecture doesn’t restrict flexibility - it enables it. When your systems are loosely coupled, you can iterate on any one of them without breaking the others. When your domain logic is isolated, you can experiment with game mechanics without worrying about cascading side effects.
The Cost of Doing Nothing
Projects without architecture don’t fail immediately. They fail gradually:
- Month 1-3: Everything is fast. Features land quickly. The team feels productive.
- Month 4-6: Some areas start getting “tricky.” Certain files become touch-points for every change. The first mysterious bugs appear - changing audio breaks inventory.
- Month 7-12: Velocity drops noticeably. Features that should take days take weeks. New team members struggle to become productive. “Don’t touch that file” becomes a common warning.
- Year 2+: The codebase is a liability. Major features are avoided because the risk of breakage is too high. The team spends more time fighting the code than building the game. Rewrites are discussed but the cost is prohibitive.
This progression is not universal - but it is common enough that most experienced game developers will recognize it. Clean Game Architecture is designed to break this cycle by establishing structural rules early, when the cost of discipline is low and the compound benefits are enormous.
The Way Out
Understanding these pitfalls is the first step. The Architecture Model describes the structural solution - how layers and dependency rules prevent the interconnection chaos. The Singleton Anti-Pattern examines the most common specific failure mode in detail.
But knowing the architecture isn’t enough. You need the Technical Toolkit to actually implement it in code - the concrete mechanisms that make loose coupling possible in practice.