[MUD-Dev] Crunch time

[J C Lawrence]

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
inventing the field, raw CS-work, as you go along, _and_ and a result
defining the game definition as a product of the capabilities you've
just invented.  If you attempt to refute that fact and pick your
absolutes early in the process you end up shipping a game using three to
five year old technology -- something the market doesn't tend to relish.

This is rather different than most business software development where
the field and the technologies used as well developed, well explored,
and well known.

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.  Feature and technology creep during a product
development cycle is s simple fact of life that you live with and try to
manage reasonably.  And it is a race.  At some point you start drawing
lines in the sand and saying, 

  "If we don't stop here we're going to be forever chasing the next
  Great Thing!"

and so you go into crunch mode so you can ship the bloody thing before
the background technology changes so much that not continuing to play
catch-up was stupid.

Whaddya want, nice predictable technology evolution cycles or something?

--
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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