[MUD-Dev] Crunch time

[Derek Licciardi]

From: 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.

...

> 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,

In many ways both of you are right.  While there are forces in the
industry that promote change during a project's lifecycle, those
forces usually have somewhat of a pattern to them and are well
known. Witness SWG building a graphics engine that doesn't run all
out on today's hardware.  They've planned to overcome the notion
that your engine is old on release and seem to have accomplished
their goals.

I believe the game industry could learn lessons from seasoned
business practices and even the other way around.  Business' have
typically sterilized the process so much that its no wonder we have
web sites and applications that put people to sleep while they work.
The one thing I do know, is that as teams get larger, budgets grow
and traditional investment gets more involved, this constantly
changing lifecycle of game development is going to be forced to
stabilize.  All in all, it could be a good thing.  Wouldn't it be
nice if we had relatively predictable technology cycles?

Derek
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