17 ms·

A drive-by pronouncement, one that is probably wrong because of how reductive it is, but it is visceral to me because I've been dealing with a similar situation

A drive-by pronouncement, one that is probably wrong because of how reductive it is, but it is visceral to me because I've been dealing with a similar situation at work: you can't trick computers. You can't intimidate them into working with groupthink, coercive meetings, aggressive talks, or vague threats of losing face, position, or job. They are binary. You either make something that produces the output you want, or you get a buggy, unworkable mess (to various levels of unworkable). All the crunch and pain and buggy games are a result of humans trying to force the other humans who are programming the games and content, and indirectly, the computers themselves into doing a rush job. You can't rush art. Programming is an art since whatever is being programmed has never been made before, else you could go Copy + Paste and be done. Yes, there are millions of paintings of meadows, just as there are millions of copies of very similar but ever-so-slightly different boring line of business applications. But if you want THIS painting, this one that you have commissioned to show the meadow in YOUR back yard, you can't rush the artist, or else the painting quality will be reduced. Depending on how much rush you add, the quality can be subtly bad but close enough, or horrifically bad as if, say, this pretentious commenter were painting it. Let the artists (programmers) take the time they need to produce the artifact. Yes, the artists can sometimes get stuck in cycles of tweaks (goldplating) and need to be told this artifact is done, ship it, but it always seems like we lean too far to the other side: feature factories, churn churn churn, crunch crunch crunch. Let the artists paint / program in peace!

willis936 5y ago
I thought the magic of Halo died a decade ago but I see the 180 that Infinite pulled in the past year and recently learned that Staten returned around that time. As Feynmann said, there are no miracle men, but Staten knows the formula for making a good game. He was there when Bungie had creative freedom and was making games that they wanted to play. Having him come on as a leader with political power was the only way Infinite could have ever been anything other than a disaster. The recent IGN interview was great. It was an hour of hot chocolate for my niche demographic. It also confirmed that the magic of Halo was what we thought it was all along. You want to make a great game? Watch the Halo Vid Docs and take notes. https://youtu.be/EqfPclVRioI https://youtu.be/EqfPclVRioI
- pas 5y ago
  could you please tl;dr the magic for those who are completely out of the Haloverse? (I played about 3 levels of the first one, it was ok for that time, I know people really love it, but so do Doom, or Diablo, etc)
  - willis936 5y ago
    Bungie in its day was very grounded and in-tune with "the player experience". The team would play the game with each other at the end of every day and have fun doing it. Only things that made the game more fun were put in. As for storytelling in the campaigns: it was a space opera complete with mysticism and an epic journey. It's really hard to stretch that into a never-ending story, but the books have done well. The games have not. The first problem is in making the self-insert chief a human. It was obvious from the beginning. When I played Halo 4 I had a mental list of all the ways the creative direction dropped the ball. There's something that 343's culture has never understood about the Halo games. They think it's a Michael Bay film because the audience is young men but it's more like Star Wars V. This is a highlight reel of what I'm talking about. https://youtu.be/6qfx9eoB-88 https://youtu.be/6qfx9eoB-88
Kranar 5y ago
I'll go against the grain and say that you can rush a game, you can overwork people, and that in many cases, for many companies, doing so is the only path to success. We're talking about one of the most successful companies in Poland that you only know about because they managed to produce some of the most popular and profitable games ever created, and they didn't get to this point by letting developers and managers take their sweet time. Are you going to try to tell me that The Witcher 3 was developed by having everyone work a standard 8 hour day and that the team was given as much time as they felt was needed to produce it? Of course not... it was developed with just as much of a crunch, pressure and "inhumane working conditions" [1] as Cyberpunk 2077, but because it was a resounding success on all platforms, no one batted an eye. The issues with Cyberpunk 2077 have next to nothing to do with crunch time, they simply tried to make a game for a platform that was never going to be able to support it, regardless of how much time they took. The game on PC is a masterpiece of technology, it looks and feels amazing and it's a resounding success. The failure on PS4 and XBox is because those platforms were still very large markets and they wanted to take advantage of them and well push come to shove, there's just no way of making the game play well on them. That's all there is to this story, making a game for a platform that can't support it is going to be a failure. Now that Cyberpunk has failed, people will use that failure as a way to argue about things that likely have nothing to do with the cause of the failure, and you know maybe that's a good thing and better working conditions come of it... I don't know... what I do know is even if CD Projekt Red decides to change its working culture for the next game they make, there's dozens of other new game studios rising up and it may be the case that the only way for them to compete with the existing giants is to work day and night to the bone on making the next masterpiece. [1] https://www.gamebyte.com/cd-projekt-red-admits-crunch-period-for-the-witcher-3-was-not-humane/ https://www.gamebyte.com/cd-projekt-red-admits-crunch-period...
- kvark 5y ago
  I'm sorry, the game on PC was a crappy bugfest. And as for being "impossible" on consoles... Isn't it effectively GTA in a different setting? GTA managed to run fine, and Cyberpunk could, but they weren't able to reach it.
  - 5y ago
zargon 5y ago
Like artists, some programmers are able to make the tradeoffs to get the product out the door and others aren't. Compare Brandon Sanderson, who announces annually what to expect from him in the coming year and generally lives up to it, to Patrick Rothfuss, who lashes out to attack any fan who asks about the novel he claimed to be working on for the last 10 years. Similar to game titles such as Minecraft vs Star Citizen. Some people will never finish or keep starting over or keep expanding scope, and others have a gift of the ability to balance conflicting needs just right. It's more about getting the right personalities on your team than giving blanket license for artists to take as long as they please.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  Everyone, every writer anyway, knows that Sanderson is a freak of nature. Much to be admired, but not a standard by which to measure yourself.
  - zargon 5y ago
    Certainly true. Both examples are on the extreme side of the spectrum.
louthy 5y ago
Artists don’t get paid until their work is complete, do you think programmers would accept that model?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- eru 5y ago
  If the people who made that offer had a good track record, and the money was good enough, I would. (In some sense, this reminds me of getting startup equity, which is basically worthless until the company goes public.)
eru 5y ago
> You can't rush art. Programming is an art since whatever is being programmed has never been made before, else you could go Copy + Paste and be done. Eh, if you want to make a comparison, I would put most corporate programming into the bin of 'craft', much more than 'art'. It's of course all subjective, and there's no one true category. They are just different ways of thinking about the subject.
- thuccess129 5y ago
  > I would put most corporate programming into the bin of 'craft', much more than 'art'. A former corporate programmer who was a highly paid corporate programmer at the time when he told me this is that all they do is very fast simple arithmetic. Add and subtract. Great hackers on the PG spectrum may get struck by inspiration and may outperform the average corporate programmer by 10x or 100x or more and work crazy hours while the creative electricity buzzes.
  - eru 5y ago
    > A former corporate programmer who was a highly paid corporate programmer at the time when he told me this is that all they do is very fast simple arithmetic. Add and subtract. It totally depends. Most corporate programming is CRUD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delet...), so not much arithmetic involved. But a lot of 'book keeping', and organising your information. Not rocket science, but more listening to your stakeholders. > Great hackers on the PG spectrum may get struck by inspiration and may outperform the average corporate programmer by 10x or 100x or more and work crazy hours while the creative electricity buzzes. See also Carmack etc. But I was talking about the typical programming tasks.

willis936 5y ago

I thought the magic of Halo died a decade ago but I see the 180 that Infinite pulled in the past year and recently learned that Staten returned around that time. As Feynmann said, there are no miracle men, but Staten knows the formula for making a good game. He was there when Bungie had creative freedom and was making games that they wanted to play. Having him come on as a leader with political power was the only way Infinite could have ever been anything other than a disaster. The recent IGN interview was great. It was an hour of hot chocolate for my niche demographic. It also confirmed that the magic of Halo was what we thought it was all along. You want to make a great game? Watch the Halo Vid Docs and take notes. https://youtu.be/EqfPclVRioI https://youtu.be/EqfPclVRioI

pas 5y ago
could you please tl;dr the magic for those who are completely out of the Haloverse? (I played about 3 levels of the first one, it was ok for that time, I know people really love it, but so do Doom, or Diablo, etc)
- willis936 5y ago
  Bungie in its day was very grounded and in-tune with "the player experience". The team would play the game with each other at the end of every day and have fun doing it. Only things that made the game more fun were put in. As for storytelling in the campaigns: it was a space opera complete with mysticism and an epic journey. It's really hard to stretch that into a never-ending story, but the books have done well. The games have not. The first problem is in making the self-insert chief a human. It was obvious from the beginning. When I played Halo 4 I had a mental list of all the ways the creative direction dropped the ball. There's something that 343's culture has never understood about the Halo games. They think it's a Michael Bay film because the audience is young men but it's more like Star Wars V. This is a highlight reel of what I'm talking about. https://youtu.be/6qfx9eoB-88 https://youtu.be/6qfx9eoB-88

Kranar 5y ago

I'll go against the grain and say that you can rush a game, you can overwork people, and that in many cases, for many companies, doing so is the only path to success. We're talking about one of the most successful companies in Poland that you only know about because they managed to produce some of the most popular and profitable games ever created, and they didn't get to this point by letting developers and managers take their sweet time. Are you going to try to tell me that The Witcher 3 was developed by having everyone work a standard 8 hour day and that the team was given as much time as they felt was needed to produce it? Of course not... it was developed with just as much of a crunch, pressure and "inhumane working conditions" [1] as Cyberpunk 2077, but because it was a resounding success on all platforms, no one batted an eye. The issues with Cyberpunk 2077 have next to nothing to do with crunch time, they simply tried to make a game for a platform that was never going to be able to support it, regardless of how much time they took. The game on PC is a masterpiece of technology, it looks and feels amazing and it's a resounding success. The failure on PS4 and XBox is because those platforms were still very large markets and they wanted to take advantage of them and well push come to shove, there's just no way of making the game play well on them. That's all there is to this story, making a game for a platform that can't support it is going to be a failure. Now that Cyberpunk has failed, people will use that failure as a way to argue about things that likely have nothing to do with the cause of the failure, and you know maybe that's a good thing and better working conditions come of it... I don't know... what I do know is even if CD Projekt Red decides to change its working culture for the next game they make, there's dozens of other new game studios rising up and it may be the case that the only way for them to compete with the existing giants is to work day and night to the bone on making the next masterpiece. [1] https://www.gamebyte.com/cd-projekt-red-admits-crunch-period-for-the-witcher-3-was-not-humane/ https://www.gamebyte.com/cd-projekt-red-admits-crunch-period...

kvark 5y ago
I'm sorry, the game on PC was a crappy bugfest. And as for being "impossible" on consoles... Isn't it effectively GTA in a different setting? GTA managed to run fine, and Cyberpunk could, but they weren't able to reach it.
- 5y ago

zargon 5y ago

Like artists, some programmers are able to make the tradeoffs to get the product out the door and others aren't. Compare Brandon Sanderson, who announces annually what to expect from him in the coming year and generally lives up to it, to Patrick Rothfuss, who lashes out to attack any fan who asks about the novel he claimed to be working on for the last 10 years. Similar to game titles such as Minecraft vs Star Citizen. Some people will never finish or keep starting over or keep expanding scope, and others have a gift of the ability to balance conflicting needs just right. It's more about getting the right personalities on your team than giving blanket license for artists to take as long as they please.

andrewflnr 5y ago
Everyone, every writer anyway, knows that Sanderson is a freak of nature. Much to be admired, but not a standard by which to measure yourself.
- zargon 5y ago
  Certainly true. Both examples are on the extreme side of the spectrum.

louthy 5y ago

Artists don’t get paid until their work is complete, do you think programmers would accept that model?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
eru 5y ago
If the people who made that offer had a good track record, and the money was good enough, I would. (In some sense, this reminds me of getting startup equity, which is basically worthless until the company goes public.)

eru 5y ago

> You can't rush art. Programming is an art since whatever is being programmed has never been made before, else you could go Copy + Paste and be done. Eh, if you want to make a comparison, I would put most corporate programming into the bin of 'craft', much more than 'art'. It's of course all subjective, and there's no one true category. They are just different ways of thinking about the subject.

thuccess129 5y ago
> I would put most corporate programming into the bin of 'craft', much more than 'art'. A former corporate programmer who was a highly paid corporate programmer at the time when he told me this is that all they do is very fast simple arithmetic. Add and subtract. Great hackers on the PG spectrum may get struck by inspiration and may outperform the average corporate programmer by 10x or 100x or more and work crazy hours while the creative electricity buzzes.
- eru 5y ago
  > A former corporate programmer who was a highly paid corporate programmer at the time when he told me this is that all they do is very fast simple arithmetic. Add and subtract. It totally depends. Most corporate programming is CRUD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delet...), so not much arithmetic involved. But a lot of 'book keeping', and organising your information. Not rocket science, but more listening to your stakeholders. > Great hackers on the PG spectrum may get struck by inspiration and may outperform the average corporate programmer by 10x or 100x or more and work crazy hours while the creative electricity buzzes. See also Carmack etc. But I was talking about the typical programming tasks.