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Half-Life was almost completely redesigned from scratch because they realized well into the project that the game they were making was not fun. You can read abo

by henning 17y ago

Half-Life was almost completely redesigned from scratch because they realized well into the project that the game they were making was not fun. You can read about it at http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991210/birdwell_01.htm http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19991210/birdwell_01.htm , I've posted it here before. The rest is history.

DannoHung 17y ago
Valve practices like... anti-agile. They take something and they say, "No, it's not PERFECT, let's start over." And they're heroes.
- unalone 17y ago
  Pixar's the same way. They halted production of Toy Story for the better part of a year (if I recall the time correctly) so that the writers could improve the story. Valve is terrific. I'll love them forever not for Half-Life, which is great but flawed, but for Steam, which lets me buy games quickly and has incredible weekend deals. (Two weeks ago they sold 10 brilliant indie games for $30. Best game-related deal since the Orange Box, which incidentally was also Valve.)
  - wlievens 17y ago
    Eight games, IIRC. I bought that pack too since I hadn't played Goo and Braid yet past the demo.
- roc 17y ago
  It's not all that different. The biggest distinction is they keep the bulk of their iteration private. They use themselves as the ultimate customer and iterate until they have a product they love. See Also: Blizzard, Apple
- ErrantX 17y ago
  is that a bad thing? The description he makes of how they cut the game into one level and had a team essentially scrum on it for months bis kinda agile. I've seen GN do a talk about developing HL1 - one of the things he said was that he learned a long time ago to come up with your own design process. Because "otherwise you spend as long getting a team into someone else's groove as you do making the product" :) (Valve IMO are a masterclass in how you can spend years developing a game and still maintain a huge number of fans: mostly because everything that leaves the door is a quality product and so much fun).
davi 17y ago
"We set up a small group of people to take every silly idea, every cool trick, everything interesting that existed in any kind of working state somewhere in the game and put them into a single prototype level. When the level started to get fun, they added more variations of the fun things. If an idea wasn’t fun, they cut it. When they needed a software feature, they simplified it until it was something that could be written in a few days. They all worked together on this one small level for a month while the rest of us basically did nothing. When they were done, we all played it. It was great." Nice illustration of Gail's Law, from a comment [1] on HN today: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%27s_law [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775134 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775134
jrockway 17y ago
That's a great article. I see some of the techniques that made free software so successful; like only allowing people to suggest ideas if it's something they could reasonably implement. ("Patches welcome")
patio11 17y ago
From that article: Avoid all one-shot technical elements. Anything that requires engineering work must be used in more than one spot in the game. Engineers are really slow. It takes them months to get anything done. If what they do is only used once, it’s a waste of a limited resource. I'm not sure I 100% agree with this but it is something to keep in mind for many of us: if we're programming it, it should scale. Not scale to a hundred thousand users, that is easy. No, it should scale hilariously disproportionately to time invested. Getting a new landing page on my site took me about an hour of programmer time. That is... well, OK, it performed well so it wasn't a waste of time, but it is something that I don't want to have to repeat for every landing page. A little bit of Rails magic, though, and that one landing page became seven hundred. And additional ones can be created by my freelancers, whose time is very, very cheap relative to mine.
- jhancock 17y ago
  your doing a 700 split test? can't wait to see the blog post on that!!!

by henning 17y ago

DannoHung 17y ago

Valve practices like... anti-agile. They take something and they say, "No, it's not PERFECT, let's start over." And they're heroes.

unalone 17y ago
Pixar's the same way. They halted production of Toy Story for the better part of a year (if I recall the time correctly) so that the writers could improve the story. Valve is terrific. I'll love them forever not for Half-Life, which is great but flawed, but for Steam, which lets me buy games quickly and has incredible weekend deals. (Two weeks ago they sold 10 brilliant indie games for $30. Best game-related deal since the Orange Box, which incidentally was also Valve.)
- wlievens 17y ago
  Eight games, IIRC. I bought that pack too since I hadn't played Goo and Braid yet past the demo.
roc 17y ago
It's not all that different. The biggest distinction is they keep the bulk of their iteration private. They use themselves as the ultimate customer and iterate until they have a product they love. See Also: Blizzard, Apple
ErrantX 17y ago
is that a bad thing? The description he makes of how they cut the game into one level and had a team essentially scrum on it for months bis kinda agile. I've seen GN do a talk about developing HL1 - one of the things he said was that he learned a long time ago to come up with your own design process. Because "otherwise you spend as long getting a team into someone else's groove as you do making the product" :) (Valve IMO are a masterclass in how you can spend years developing a game and still maintain a huge number of fans: mostly because everything that leaves the door is a quality product and so much fun).

davi 17y ago

"We set up a small group of people to take every silly idea, every cool trick, everything interesting that existed in any kind of working state somewhere in the game and put them into a single prototype level. When the level started to get fun, they added more variations of the fun things. If an idea wasn’t fun, they cut it. When they needed a software feature, they simplified it until it was something that could be written in a few days. They all worked together on this one small level for a month while the rest of us basically did nothing. When they were done, we all played it. It was great." Nice illustration of Gail's Law, from a comment [1] on HN today: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%27s_law [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775134 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775134

jrockway 17y ago

That's a great article. I see some of the techniques that made free software so successful; like only allowing people to suggest ideas if it's something they could reasonably implement. ("Patches welcome")

patio11 17y ago

From that article: Avoid all one-shot technical elements. Anything that requires engineering work must be used in more than one spot in the game. Engineers are really slow. It takes them months to get anything done. If what they do is only used once, it’s a waste of a limited resource. I'm not sure I 100% agree with this but it is something to keep in mind for many of us: if we're programming it, it should scale. Not scale to a hundred thousand users, that is easy. No, it should scale hilariously disproportionately to time invested. Getting a new landing page on my site took me about an hour of programmer time. That is... well, OK, it performed well so it wasn't a waste of time, but it is something that I don't want to have to repeat for every landing page. A little bit of Rails magic, though, and that one landing page became seven hundred. And additional ones can be created by my freelancers, whose time is very, very cheap relative to mine.

jhancock 17y ago
your doing a 700 split test? can't wait to see the blog post on that!!!