A product owner / manager / something asking for passion so people can work faster... I work on a different field but have lived those "two weeks to push 10 lines of code" situations. First a dev...
A product owner / manager / something asking for passion so people can work faster...
I work on a different field but have lived those "two weeks to push 10 lines of code" situations. First a dev team usually has 4-6 weeks worth of work already scheduled, those 10 lines have to get into that backlog of work. Second those 10 lines of code have to be produced, which then may become 2000 lines, sent to automated testing, integrate and rebuild the artifact, actually test the artifact, etc. It is not uncommon for POs to check on the feature and make last minute comments and changes. All that has to fit in the time estimate because someone (maybe not this PO) will take your word for it and punish you if you need more time. Jira is very good at decontextualizing problems.
Passion is a terrible word to throw at people, specially down the pecking order.
In his defense, when he was developing fallout his team was probably much smaller and was composed of young people who all had the same stakes in the success of the game. It is a very different dynamic when you are leading a commoditized dev team from afar.
I agree with what you, however I am not giving him a pass. He is around the same age as I am, plus or minus a few years perhaps so am a bit more critical. Anyway, he should know better. Comparing...
I agree with what you, however I am not giving him a pass. He is around the same age as I am, plus or minus a few years perhaps so am a bit more critical. Anyway, he should know better. Comparing today to how I, and I assume he worked 20 or 30 years ago is dumb. Let's disconnect ourselves from reality and let's travel to a utopia world with few hackers (when the word didn't have negative connotation), filled with Doritos and my fav of CHEETOS, soda, and cold pizza. Too safe and no passion you say! Really? Hey, we built these processes, don't like the results? I got an idea for you, change the process. In the ephemeral godly voice of my choosing, where's the beef? Change the process, and then show us. But hey, it's easier to sit in my comfy chair and watch the world burn while I see a middle age man make unrealistic YT comments. Just saying... man I got triggered, and went of on a micro aggression and it's only Monday, wow!
Absolutely. Passion is borne of having a stake in a project's success and feeling ownership of the work you do. If you aren't giving employees royalties or partial ownership, or if you are...
Passion is a terrible word to throw at people, specially down the pecking order.
Absolutely. Passion is borne of having a stake in a project's success and feeling ownership of the work you do. If you aren't giving employees royalties or partial ownership, or if you are micromanaging their work and telling them what to do, you simply aren't going to get passion out of them — and if they somehow do have passion anyway, you will grind it out of them quickly.
This is simply the cost of large, risk-averse projects. The owners and the leads can be passionate, but everyone else is just a swappable cog in the machine and they know it. A large, complex machine can't function reliably without its cogs, so being annoyed at the cogs for being cogs isn't just cruel; it's moronic.
Those unreal features are very cool. But there is zero evidence that making developers more productive will make games more manageable. The scope and quality standards can just as easily rise....
Those unreal features are very cool. But there is zero evidence that making developers more productive will make games more manageable. The scope and quality standards can just as easily rise. Which is mostly what we've seen from better tooling. The only thing that will make games more manageable is a focus on making medium sized games from those in power.
The only way I see that happening is that most game platform become subscription focused a la gamepass, then having a bulk of AA / good enough games would be a commercial advantage, maybe. The...
The only thing that will make games more manageable is a focus on making medium sized games from those in power.
The only way I see that happening is that most game platform become subscription focused a la gamepass, then having a bulk of AA / good enough games would be a commercial advantage, maybe.
The market for games is so saturated that marketing is becoming the most important feature of a game, and marketing requires cool graphics / set pieces to show in trailers, and buzzwords (like ray tracing, or pixel art, or saying your game is inspired by older beloved games).
I wonder if this is a byproduct of having so many sales. The only time a game can get full price purchases is at launch, and that lives and dies on marketing. Purchases from word of mouth recommendations (the ones you get from good writing or good gameplay) usually wait for the next sale.
This is a big part of why I'm excited about UE5. You already mentioned metahuman, but other features like Lumen and even Nanite present potentially massive time savings for studios building games....
This is a big part of why I'm excited about UE5. You already mentioned metahuman, but other features like Lumen and even Nanite present potentially massive time savings for studios building games.
A lot of people poo-poo ray tracing as a gimmick, without knowing the sheer amount of labor that goes into getting sub-par results out of current rasterized lighting solutions.
Timothy Cain is an American video game developer best known as the creator, producer, lead programmer and one of the main designers of the 1997 computer game Fallout. In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time. (Wikipedia).
A product owner / manager / something asking for passion so people can work faster...
I work on a different field but have lived those "two weeks to push 10 lines of code" situations. First a dev team usually has 4-6 weeks worth of work already scheduled, those 10 lines have to get into that backlog of work. Second those 10 lines of code have to be produced, which then may become 2000 lines, sent to automated testing, integrate and rebuild the artifact, actually test the artifact, etc. It is not uncommon for POs to check on the feature and make last minute comments and changes. All that has to fit in the time estimate because someone (maybe not this PO) will take your word for it and punish you if you need more time. Jira is very good at decontextualizing problems.
Passion is a terrible word to throw at people, specially down the pecking order.
In his defense, when he was developing fallout his team was probably much smaller and was composed of young people who all had the same stakes in the success of the game. It is a very different dynamic when you are leading a commoditized dev team from afar.
I agree with what you, however I am not giving him a pass. He is around the same age as I am, plus or minus a few years perhaps so am a bit more critical. Anyway, he should know better. Comparing today to how I, and I assume he worked 20 or 30 years ago is dumb. Let's disconnect ourselves from reality and let's travel to a utopia world with few hackers (when the word didn't have negative connotation), filled with Doritos and my fav of CHEETOS, soda, and cold pizza. Too safe and no passion you say! Really? Hey, we built these processes, don't like the results? I got an idea for you, change the process. In the ephemeral godly voice of my choosing, where's the beef? Change the process, and then show us. But hey, it's easier to sit in my comfy chair and watch the world burn while I see a middle age man make unrealistic YT comments. Just saying... man I got triggered, and went of on a micro aggression and it's only Monday, wow!
Absolutely. Passion is borne of having a stake in a project's success and feeling ownership of the work you do. If you aren't giving employees royalties or partial ownership, or if you are micromanaging their work and telling them what to do, you simply aren't going to get passion out of them — and if they somehow do have passion anyway, you will grind it out of them quickly.
This is simply the cost of large, risk-averse projects. The owners and the leads can be passionate, but everyone else is just a swappable cog in the machine and they know it. A large, complex machine can't function reliably without its cogs, so being annoyed at the cogs for being cogs isn't just cruel; it's moronic.
Those unreal features are very cool. But there is zero evidence that making developers more productive will make games more manageable. The scope and quality standards can just as easily rise. Which is mostly what we've seen from better tooling. The only thing that will make games more manageable is a focus on making medium sized games from those in power.
The only way I see that happening is that most game platform become subscription focused a la gamepass, then having a bulk of AA / good enough games would be a commercial advantage, maybe.
The market for games is so saturated that marketing is becoming the most important feature of a game, and marketing requires cool graphics / set pieces to show in trailers, and buzzwords (like ray tracing, or pixel art, or saying your game is inspired by older beloved games).
I wonder if this is a byproduct of having so many sales. The only time a game can get full price purchases is at launch, and that lives and dies on marketing. Purchases from word of mouth recommendations (the ones you get from good writing or good gameplay) usually wait for the next sale.
This is a big part of why I'm excited about UE5. You already mentioned metahuman, but other features like Lumen and even Nanite present potentially massive time savings for studios building games.
A lot of people poo-poo ray tracing as a gimmick, without knowing the sheer amount of labor that goes into getting sub-par results out of current rasterized lighting solutions.
The only reason I dislike ray-tracing is that it makes my shitty machine less likely to run a game well :(