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"There is absolutely no design document whatsoever...[it] lives in Sid's brain."
- danteembermage 17y agoThis sounds like release early, release often only in house. Pixar would be another good example of this; they storyboard the whole movie and other employees "watch" it with in house voice acting it until it's good enough to animate.
- philwelch 17y agoEven Apple does this: that's the point of Steve Jobs' legendary tendency to criticize in-house prototypes over and over until he's satisfied.
- gnoupi 17y agoNot sure Steve Jobs's tendency to criticize is specific to in-house prototypes, though.
- pmiller2 17y agoSee http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=More_Like_A_Porsche.txt&characters=Steve%20Jobs&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... for an anecdote about Steve Jobs and the design of the original Macintosh. I've heard variations of this story for other products, too, so I suspect he's got things structured so he has a final veto on any design.
- zzzmarcus 17y agoThe key lesson is the last sentence: "He knows that just because we can add something to the game, doesn't mean we should."
- sunir 17y agoI'm interested why the journalist added the dynamic at the end of the article, when stellar performers like Sid are contrasted against mediocre or non-performers like the junior designer. The implication Sid is the bad guy because he is deflating many careers. It does really suck when you work the hardest you can, fail, and you find out there is someone who is just so much better than you who consistently beats you. It often does create a caustic culture and a risky business environment where the company is overly reliant on one person and has no one else on the bench when the Truck Number gets called in. But, one could easily argue that holding stellar performers back from expressing their talents is worse since they are just so much better. Could you imagine a world without Civilation because it made some people feel inadequate?
- Tichy 17y agoI'd also like to hear the whole story about this. Was the Sid-prototype really created out of the blue, or had it been brewing in his head for quite a while? And so on... Not saying that Sid isn't great, just saying that the comparison might be a bit unfair. Also perhaps the junior designer was given a too specific task, whereas Sid can just create whatever he fancies (he probably has no "make a game where pirates shoot each other, but it also has to include a fun treasure hunt" directive to follow).
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- 10ren 17y agoThe article said he made "some junior designer mistakes". If Sid talked to him about what those specific mistakes were, and tried to identify what attitudes/misunderstandings/inexperience/lack of skill caused him to make those mistakes, and how, specifically, Sid avoided them, this would be an incredibly vivid learning experience; and a deeply motivating experience for someone who wanted to improve. It's an ideal opportunity to develop talent. It's true that Sid probably doesn't fully understand his own approach, and even if he did, there's a junior designer would be able to absorb and adopt it all instantly. However, Sid would have some understanding, and the junior designer would be able to absorb and start adopting some of it; and simply having a kind and encouraging word from Sid would count for a lot. If Sid didn't go to the trouble of doing this, or if the junior designer expected to be great without practice, it would indeed be demotivating.
- wglb 17y agoInteresting that Sid's code is "old school" and the C++ guys don't like it. I wonder if he uses C.
- garnet7 17y agoI'll bet it's some tight subset of C++, leaving out some of the more "advanced" features.
- pmiller2 17y ago>I'll bet it's some tight subset of C++, leaving out some of the more "advanced" features. Isn't that just the definition of sane code when it comes to C++? Personally, I despise C++ for a number of reasons that I won't go into in this comment. OTOH, if the subset of C++ you use is roughly "C with classes and namespaces," then I can generally tolerate it.
- vegai 17y agoGenerally speaking, anything the C++ guys don't like is good.
- thras 17y agoI'm curious, have you seen enough C++ to know the differences between 1990's C++ and 2000's C++, and really prefer 1990's C++ because "C++ guys don't like it"?
- dtf 17y agoFunny, I read "old school" as a kinder euphemism for shoddy (with all due respect to Sid's brilliance as a designer and hacker). Sometimes great people write crap, unmaintainable code. I've known several types like this in the industries I've worked in. You need a small army of programmers who can respect coding standards to clean up after them. As for C++, I've looked at some of the Civ 4 source and it seems fairly industry standard "game style" C++. It uses templates, but not heavily, and some boost to provide Python scripting.
- ars 17y agoSid has both pros and cons. On one hand you can do amazing stuff, well sid can. But it doesn't scale. And really successful companies figure out how to scale. But the ones that do amazing work have a single person who is responsible for it all. It's too bad there are not more geniuses in the world.
- Kliment 17y agoWell, the thing is, design scales. Having a single person doing design is not a limit to scalability. Having a single person doing customer support, or sales, or implementation can be. Crowds of geniuses tend to lead to the opposite of scalability.
- Tichy 17y agoHe seems to have created a lot of games, though. In what way should he scale - then there would be 1000 versions of Civ instead of just 4 by now? Since I consider games to be works of art: can art even scale, ever? Would 1000 albums by Radiohead be better than 10?
- dbz 17y agoEspecially the end. Really. They make him out to be the Chuck Norris of game creation.
- pmiller2 17y agoI'm half expecting someone to post a list of Sid Meier facts now.
- mdemare 17y agoSid Meier is one of my programming heroes. I'd love to see a "Coders At Work" with only game programmers (instead of mostly language designers).
- jvipond 17y agoYou should take a look here at Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/index.html http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/index.html
- Luc 17y agoOh dear, that will induce a nostalgia overload. Though I wish there was a hardcopy of this I could buy at the second-hand bookstore (it was released on a diskette in 1997).
- gjm11 17y agoThere are a lot of language designers in Coders at Work, but it's not "mostly". Language designers: Brendan Eich, Joe Armstrong, Simon Peyton Jones, Guy Steele, Dan Ingalls, Ken Thompson Not language designers: Jamie Zawinski, Brad Fitzpatrick, Douglas Crockford, Peter Norvig, Bernie Cosell Marginal cases: Joshua Bloch, L Peter Deutsch, Fran Allen, Donald Knuth which comes to 6/5/4. (Justifications for the marginal cases: Bloch does lots of Java library work, but not AFAIK a lot of language design, and the language itself certainly isn't his; Deutsch did some very important language implementation but that's not all the same thing as language design; Allen, likewise; Knuth's TeX and METAFONT are both, in their way, languages, but that's not primarily what they are.) I wouldn't call that "mostly language designers". (For the avoidance of doubt: I think a "Game Programmers at Work" volume could be extremely interesting.)
- mbrubeck 17y agomdemare was maybe thinking of Masterminds of Programming, which was like Coders at Work but with only language designers.
- allenp 17y ago