VIDEOMANCER

look at this ps1 rose i made its black cuz im goth

I know Bethesda has the (well deserved) reputation of creating their games out of hacked together duct-tape-laden spaghetti code on an ancient quirky engine but I feel like FromSoft deserves their fair mention too. Bonfires aren't objects, they're a visual mesh with an invisible NPC standing on top of it that you "talk to" when you want to sit. Tons of enemies are just two NPCs glued on top of one another because they didn't know how to make an enemy have more than one attack that can fire off at a time. Winter lanterns' frenzy buildup attack comes from an invisible guy sitting on their heads shooting you with an invisible gun. Djura doesn't shoot you with his gatling gun, he just sits there doing nothing (with his cape sitting right around his ears due to how the game renders cloth physics from far away) because the actual NPC shooting you is the gun itself. Lothric and Lorian aren't two separate NPCs holding onto each other, they're one NPC with a second, invisible NPC glued to its back that takes damage on behalf of Lothric. Why? Because they couldn't figure out how to make one NPC ride on another one. They straight up went "We couldn't figure out how to make one NPC ride another, so we combined two NPCs into one and then glued another one to its back, simple." Really it's amazing how much of FromSoft's game design is just "we put an invisible guy here to do things because we couldn't figure out how to make the visible guy do it"

Okay those are all silly, but functional solutions to problems. This kind of seemingly lazy or duct tape like programming is quite common across tons of games. Guild Wars 2 has a giant boss that can pop in and out of the arena, but instead of actually moving the boss, they just have three copies of it with a shared health pool. The original Pokemon games are full of Just Barely functional code which was the only way to make such a big game work on such a little cartridge.