[MUD-Dev] Crunch time

[ceo]

J C Lawrence wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 09:13:00 -0400
> Yannick Jean <Yannick.Jean at meq.gouv.qc.ca> wrote:

>> The main reasons why the gaming industry is such a mess when it
>> comes to managing large project is that it's still employing
>> mostly geeks, in both high or low positions. Geeks, great as they
>> are for working days and night for your project, are notoriously
>> atrocious at planning and keeping tight schedule. Give me a
>> ruthless, cold-blooded, project manager and a full staff of "8 to
>> 5" workers who got a life and a family at home and I'll give you
>> MMORPG on time, on budget and with a stable codebase.

> A large element is how well the problem space is known before
> hand, as well as how well defined it is.  In the game arena both
> tend to be rapidly shifting sands well into the development
> process.  You're

> Is it really all that bad and chaotic?  No.  It just tries to be
> fairly aggressively, and there are strong forces encouraging it.
> Strong forces that you>need< to regularly give in to, to produce
> the product quality that is required.

...

On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at 09:13 AM, Yannick Jean wrote:

> Give me a ruthless, cold-blooded, project manager and a full staff
> of "8 to 5" workers who got a life and a family at home and I'll
> give you MMORPG on time, on budget and with a stable codebase.

I have a long-running debate with our main programme manager, who
has decades of experience managing 200-300 person projects. She
remains unconvinced that the problems are inherent to the games
industry. It's also worth noting that she can quote two
horror-stories for every one (including every post-mortem around)
that you can come up with from the games-industry :). And her's are
usually worse.

I take a more moderate view - that things could be a lot better, but
the fundamentals that JC mentioned are valid and do have a
considerable effect. I find it interesting that respondents have
largely ignored the point about aggressiveness, which suggests
people are replying slightly by rote in a discussion that I'm sure
most have had many times before.

Tha aggression really matters. Good or bad, most of the drivers are
rational. Launch dates, for instance. Yes, Blizzard doesn't need to
make Xmas to make big sales, but almost everyone else really does;
90% of a game's sales are in the first 3 months after release, and
IIRC that tends to be true no matter what time of year it's released
- and at Xmas the per-month figures are a considerable multiple
higher. Rather like id Software, Blizzard have massive powers of
branding etc that are way beyond the reach of 95% of the development
studios. The "elite league" of developers play by different rules in
most aspects, including this oe.

Another example is shifting technology goalposts. How often do
business apps written for a Sun-hardware Solaris machine have to be
released on Windows 3.1 instead, with only 6 months to make the
change? (e.g. Aliens vs Predator: much of the game developed for a
console that was effectively withdrawn by their launch date; recoded
for PC + 3D hardware. Many many many show-stopping bugs as a
result).

How many industries sell to a consumer-base that for 1-2 decades has
been (possibly) the strongest driver of the mainstream
hardware-upgrade market? I add the "possibly" because I've never
seen a report on this with hard figures (does anyone know of one?
Whether for or against this claim? :)).

Other industries also have similar fundamentals - but very few have
them in such strength or extremes. Part of the problem I see is that
until the standard practices of the games industry catch up to the
quality of other industries, it's very difficult for us to make
like-for-like comparisons of whether it really is harder to satisfy
the realities of games-development...

Adam M
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