4 ms·

Such is life as a games company employee. Been there, done that and will likely never go back unless a LOT of things change in that industry. Good luck to all

Such is life as a games company employee. Been there, done that and will likely never go back unless a LOT of things change in that industry. Good luck to all the guys who were laid off, I'm sure things will work out!

InclinedPlane 15y ago
In terms of basic development best practices the game industry is easily a decade or two behind the software development industry as a whole. Death marches are commonplace. QA is often neglected. "Write the code, then fix the bugs" is a typical development style. It'll be interesting to see how long it will take to change, or if it does.
- smiler 15y ago
  I think you'll find death marches, QA often neglected and "Write the code, then fix the bugs" are far more common than you think
  - edwinnathaniel 15y ago
    Sounds like a good field for consultants and bill-by-the-hours :D
  - InclinedPlane 15y ago
    Common yes, but far more universal in the game development industry than in software dev.
  - ma2rten 15y ago
    I wasn't sure what you meant with the term death march, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. I am still not sure what you mean exactly, but I am sure it is not a fitting metaphor. EDIT: removed the quote
    - InclinedPlane 15y ago
      "Death march" is a common term of art in project management: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_management) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_management...
      - ma2rten 15y ago
        That explains it. Maybe I am overly sensitive to this, because I am German, but I still think it is not appropriate to compare your own suffering of working hard for a couple of weeks, to that of those who were forced to march into their death during the Holocaust (or other times). That it is a common term does not excuse anything.
        InclinedPlane 15y ago
        That's the way language works. I don't think the term trivializes real death marches any more than saying "I was sent to the gulag" when one means being sent off to do office drudgery diminishes the seriousness of real gulags, or saying "open-plan offices should die" diminishes the seriousness of murder or death, or using a term such as "viral video" diminishes the seriousness of the prevalence of viral infection such as HIV or the problems of cholera in the 3rd world.
        ma2rten 15y ago
        You are right. I don't really feel offended anymore. It's just, that this type of thing goes against my upbringing. To give you an idea, if you used this metaphor in Germany it would be way worse than saying "We had to work like niggers".
        jholman 15y ago
        It's interesting to me to compare those, and claim that "if you used this metaphor [of a 'death march'] in Germany it would be way worse than saying 'We had to work like niggers' [in America]". (Note: I am neither American nor German, and all my problems are definitely of the first-world variety. I hope to be thoughtful, but I am sure to be ignorant.) In the one case, millions of people (say 5% of the country?) were terrorized, then kidnapped from their homes, then treated astonishingly badly, and then many of them were murdered. And it happened during a brief period of 5 years or so, 60 years ago. Short duration, but pretty recent. In the other case, first of all, consider only the so-called Middle Passage. The total number of people involved is roughly comparable (over 10M), and mortality rate was perhaps a little lower, but roughly comparable (millions died). There then followed generations of maltreatment; appalling as the physical treatment is, the long-term cultural impact of generations of forced ignorance is arguably worse. (I think we can all agree that the oppressed people of Germany are doing much better now [65 years after 1945] than were, say, the Americans of African descent in 1930 [that's 65 years after 1865].) The only thing that seems less horrifying about the era of slavery is that it's a little more distant, at least the really brain-wreckingly horrifying parts. So, in conclusion, it's not at all clear to this outsider why references to "death marches" are "way worse" than references to "niggers". Seems to me like they're pretty comparable.
edwinnathaniel 15y ago
A friend of mine told me a story about EA and the "lifecycle of a game". People were laid off after the game shipped have become a common occurrence. He said: "it's seasonal". I used to perceive that a game industry is a place where you only need to know C++ forever and thought for a while that "hey... that's not bad, just C++ instead of Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, Maven, XML, XSDL, SOAP, REST, HTML, HTML5, CSS", but then I learned the long hours and suboptimal development practices. Tough.
- bitwize 15y ago
  Lua is a big glue language in the game industry these days. And not just slow-paced games either; the Lua Foundation gets a credit in some of the recent Street Fighter games.
  - edwinnathaniel 15y ago
    Can you explain a little bit more how Lua fits game development? (I have never worked in a game-dev-shop before)
    - anonymoushn 15y ago
      I've also never been paid to make games, so hopefully someone who has can come along and correct me. I've found that Lua is a great fit because the cost of calling from native code to Lua and from Lua to native code is almost zero, because even running big routines of pure Lua is reasonably feasible, and because it's much more expressive than C++.
    - peacemaker 15y ago
      We mostly used Lua as a scene/level description language and for stuff like UI as you can tweak the code and see the updates live without having to rebuild anything. Plus it's really easy to implement the Lua - C++ interface and Lua is generally a nice, easy language to write in.
    - moonchrome 15y ago
      You embed the scripting language VM in to the game application and expose some API to it - which is then used to build the game content - things that require customization but aren't performance critical or technical, like triggers/events, ie. what happens when character X enters area Y, when user presses X, where it would be ridiculous to recompile the code just to modify it and you want non programmers to be able to do the customization in a "safe" language - sort of like javascript/DOM allows designers to do some programming while the grunt work and low level details/performance critical parts to the C++/native implementation.

InclinedPlane 15y ago

In terms of basic development best practices the game industry is easily a decade or two behind the software development industry as a whole. Death marches are commonplace. QA is often neglected. "Write the code, then fix the bugs" is a typical development style. It'll be interesting to see how long it will take to change, or if it does.

smiler 15y ago
I think you'll find death marches, QA often neglected and "Write the code, then fix the bugs" are far more common than you think
- edwinnathaniel 15y ago
  Sounds like a good field for consultants and bill-by-the-hours :D
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  Common yes, but far more universal in the game development industry than in software dev.
- ma2rten 15y ago
  I wasn't sure what you meant with the term death march, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. I am still not sure what you mean exactly, but I am sure it is not a fitting metaphor. EDIT: removed the quote
  - InclinedPlane 15y ago
    "Death march" is a common term of art in project management: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_management) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_management...
    - ma2rten 15y ago
      That explains it. Maybe I am overly sensitive to this, because I am German, but I still think it is not appropriate to compare your own suffering of working hard for a couple of weeks, to that of those who were forced to march into their death during the Holocaust (or other times). That it is a common term does not excuse anything.
      - InclinedPlane 15y ago
        That's the way language works. I don't think the term trivializes real death marches any more than saying "I was sent to the gulag" when one means being sent off to do office drudgery diminishes the seriousness of real gulags, or saying "open-plan offices should die" diminishes the seriousness of murder or death, or using a term such as "viral video" diminishes the seriousness of the prevalence of viral infection such as HIV or the problems of cholera in the 3rd world.
        ma2rten 15y ago
        You are right. I don't really feel offended anymore. It's just, that this type of thing goes against my upbringing. To give you an idea, if you used this metaphor in Germany it would be way worse than saying "We had to work like niggers".
        jholman 15y ago
        It's interesting to me to compare those, and claim that "if you used this metaphor [of a 'death march'] in Germany it would be way worse than saying 'We had to work like niggers' [in America]". (Note: I am neither American nor German, and all my problems are definitely of the first-world variety. I hope to be thoughtful, but I am sure to be ignorant.) In the one case, millions of people (say 5% of the country?) were terrorized, then kidnapped from their homes, then treated astonishingly badly, and then many of them were murdered. And it happened during a brief period of 5 years or so, 60 years ago. Short duration, but pretty recent. In the other case, first of all, consider only the so-called Middle Passage. The total number of people involved is roughly comparable (over 10M), and mortality rate was perhaps a little lower, but roughly comparable (millions died). There then followed generations of maltreatment; appalling as the physical treatment is, the long-term cultural impact of generations of forced ignorance is arguably worse. (I think we can all agree that the oppressed people of Germany are doing much better now [65 years after 1945] than were, say, the Americans of African descent in 1930 [that's 65 years after 1865].) The only thing that seems less horrifying about the era of slavery is that it's a little more distant, at least the really brain-wreckingly horrifying parts. So, in conclusion, it's not at all clear to this outsider why references to "death marches" are "way worse" than references to "niggers". Seems to me like they're pretty comparable.

edwinnathaniel 15y ago

A friend of mine told me a story about EA and the "lifecycle of a game". People were laid off after the game shipped have become a common occurrence. He said: "it's seasonal". I used to perceive that a game industry is a place where you only need to know C++ forever and thought for a while that "hey... that's not bad, just C++ instead of Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, Maven, XML, XSDL, SOAP, REST, HTML, HTML5, CSS", but then I learned the long hours and suboptimal development practices. Tough.

bitwize 15y ago
Lua is a big glue language in the game industry these days. And not just slow-paced games either; the Lua Foundation gets a credit in some of the recent Street Fighter games.
- edwinnathaniel 15y ago
  Can you explain a little bit more how Lua fits game development? (I have never worked in a game-dev-shop before)
  - anonymoushn 15y ago
    I've also never been paid to make games, so hopefully someone who has can come along and correct me. I've found that Lua is a great fit because the cost of calling from native code to Lua and from Lua to native code is almost zero, because even running big routines of pure Lua is reasonably feasible, and because it's much more expressive than C++.
  - peacemaker 15y ago
    We mostly used Lua as a scene/level description language and for stuff like UI as you can tweak the code and see the updates live without having to rebuild anything. Plus it's really easy to implement the Lua - C++ interface and Lua is generally a nice, easy language to write in.
  - moonchrome 15y ago
    You embed the scripting language VM in to the game application and expose some API to it - which is then used to build the game content - things that require customization but aren't performance critical or technical, like triggers/events, ie. what happens when character X enters area Y, when user presses X, where it would be ridiculous to recompile the code just to modify it and you want non programmers to be able to do the customization in a "safe" language - sort of like javascript/DOM allows designers to do some programming while the grunt work and low level details/performance critical parts to the C++/native implementation.