Problem is small companies adopt the corporate style of doing business. I worked in team of 7 people and we had legit 2 meetings a week only about productivity.
I really think that there is some kind of feminist, woke, green haired, overweight, middle aged woman in the development team that somehow manages to suck the soul out of the new games.
It's more complicated, imagine if you are tactical rpg fan and work in the game industry and the only good paying projects available are those mobile online team FPS thingies. Of course, you need the money and your heart aren't in that. And this doesn't have anything wrong with that, it happens in any profession.
A friend of mine is a film journalist. A few weeks ago he said casually that he waits to see what the general hype and consensus is around a film before he writes the review. I said "Do you need to watch the film for that? And furthermore that isn't much of a review" he explained that nobody would read his review if it didn't echo the consensus. I was rocked to my core and left the conversation with no respect for his vocation at all. It is the same everywhere is what I've seen since, nobody has their own opinion anymore and they don't even realise it. They literally wait to see what their opinion should be based on what others think EVEN if they are a professional opinion maker.
It's really sad but the problem is also the consumers of these reviews. If they see anything that goes against the popular opinion, they rip the reviewer apart. Case and point look for any RUclips video essay that says something like "maybe fallout New Vegas isn't the most bestest game ever made" and look at the dislikes and the amount of death threat in the comments
"nobody would read his review if it didn't echo the consensus" Strange since a bunch of channels on youtube popped up doingthe complete opposite of film mainstream film reviews.
We used to get validation from the people around us. Now we get it from masses of strangers clicking "like" online. Independent thought can't be sustained in that environment.
Yep. I think Starfield is a perfect example of what an enormous budget and a paralyzing amount of caution gets you. Bethesda took zero risks, and the game is bland as hell.
Skyrim also took zero risks and was a massive success
6 месяцев назад
Money. Of course, risk means the potential to lose money. But it's about money. Bethesda could have (and they could have at any time in the past) really created a new Creation Engine, *really* overhaul it. They didn't, because this costs time and (thus) money.
Skyrim gets some of the most whitewashing of any game ever - on launch it was absolutely horrible with 10+ load screens constantly through the game. Yeah it is a cool open world with a ton of content but people give a lot of passes for the things that are not cool.
Act Man included a clip from this video in a video of his, so I came to check out the full thing. I was not disappointed. You are very well-spoken and incredibly knowledgeable. Great video!
Yes, but there's also plenty of indie games that just fail. You never see them because they suck. It's better for players to not design by committee, because as players we'd rather have 3 great games and 7 awful games, than 10 meh games. But I can see suits wanting to make a predictable profit. And plenty of players do buy those by-the-numbers games, so clearly there's a market for them. And I don't think you can really argue that Ubisoft tricks its players into buying yet another Ubisoft game -- people know what they're getting into, and yet many people apparently like a predictable by-the-numbers game.
Indie games are still low budget and effort compared to company budget. Unreal engine makes the games itself. Nobody wants to program or fine tune anymore. They want the presets with no effort. Indie games do nothing new but copy and pasted old ideas to make money off of old fans. Souls-born games for example. Indies exists to make money off of old legacies and ideas. Pixel Art is absolute bloat to the indie industry. Woke workers and gamers are the problem as well.
@@lightworker2956 Just like there are RUclipsrs that fail, artists that fail, musicians that fail, startup companies of any type that fail... Like you said, we'd rather have 3 great games and 7 awful games. And that is exactly how that happens, through indie devs. The thing about "by-the-numbers" games isn't that there's a market for them, it's that people give devs the benefit of the doubt to make a better game than last time, to have improved and taken into account criticism that has been shared quite clearly on the internet. And often times they make games with ideas and concepts that are amazing and that hold so much potential so people want those games to be good sooooo badly, but then get disappointed after having played it. So, it's not that there's a markets for those meh-games, but rather people want those AAA games to be good, and are willing to spend money to try and see for themselves.
This isn't just game development, I think across tech industries this is happening. People are just more risk averse, its likely because society at large is more anxiety ridden than before, and companies are bigger and bigger like you mentioned.
It's not a problem with an anxious society. It's a problem with corporate demands. They want everything to be super duper absolutely perfectly profitable and infinitely profitable. This insanely unfair demand basically leads to a toxic environment that terrifies workers at every level.
@@natsume-hime2473 I think you might be one of the anxiety ridden. If the incentive is to make things profitable, people wouldn't feel comfortable wasting time and being cautious. It's actually really common to throw caution to the wind for the sake of profit. I think people are just avoiding negative attention for their mistakes. As industries mature, people are more concerned about the opinions of others than the results they get because their colleagues have developed strong opinions about how things should be done. But I'm just guessing.
@@brandonkellner4053 While there's some truth to what you say, that's not the biggest problem. The mass of people taking over running games companies, who are not from the games industry is actually a huge problem. Especially when they do things like exclusively promote yes men, take massive bonuses, and then lay off entire teams of dedicated developers. The end result is that and the drive for profits incentivizes ass kissing, over actually getting work done. Since if you don't kiss ass, you wind up fired for cause with a bad review from your former employer. Which can utterly ruin one's career.
Yeah, it's across US society. Pussification is the non-PC term. A term that proves itself, because that term will make the pussified uncomfortable and/or worry that it makes other people uncomfortable.
I've seen teams where The Boss would reject people's unsolicited ideas and prototype features so often that everyone just either stopped trying to contribute ideas or would look for approval at every turn in order to shield themselves from the frustration of wasted enthusiasm.
Oh totally that happened to me in one job I had. All that “brainstorming” was was the boss rejecting people’s ideas and then making everyone clap for the boss’s idea.
True bro, people are afraid to lose their job if your boss is egoistic and cant take any ideas from the others. You will hear those good ideas in the smoking area 😂
I have been on brainstorming groups put together to think of solutions for what ever concerns the current admin has at the time. We would spend hours coming up with ideas, identifying problem areas, thinking of possible solutions and writing a formal report only to have everything we come up with dismissed in favor for what ever the admin had already planned. What many of us realized over time was those committees' purpose was never to come up with solutions, they existed to give legitimacy to decisions that had already been made and provide cover by sharing fault if something didn't work. Obviously this is a example of bad management and work environment, but employees can experience this a few times and it get to the point where they stop participating mentally. If they then work at a place that has a healthy environment they first have to overcome that impulse of not caring.
Yeah, unfortunately many bosses want yes-men. Which makes it the correct career move to be a yes-man yourself. Even if you don't have such a boss: if you volunteer an idea and it's stupid, you look stupid. If you volunteer an idea and it's great, it's not like there's a huge upside for you. It's not like you're getting a 10k bonus or something.
i'd say the company should help them overcome that unhealty impules they developed, and then keep nourish that passion they were able to take back, if multiple ppl witht hat mentality, creativity, passion and will work together to achieve the same common goal i'd say it becomes very unlikely for it to not be achieved or even surpassed in its expectations/initial plans.@@Valecan
This resonates so much for me. I changed jobs from an indie studio to a "AAA" one and now, a lot of things that I would just try before, now feel almost impossible. I'll have to talk an convince so many people to try something, that I'm starting my own indie studio.
I get you, there are a lot of different work environments, and you will learn from all of them. Just be sure to prioritize your well-being before everything. Specially when you're young, you can quit and move to other companies. Also I'll stay open to Indie and AAA, to learn from everything. Just my 2 cents! @@coltonkearschner9593
The core idea and interactive gameplay are at the core of the game. AAA games are very cautious to take risks in altering the gaming experience (why fix it if it ain’t broken?). This is the reason 3A games get stale with each release. In an indie studio you can take risks, because the creators had a vision for it. They’ll want to take it all the way. However, after the core is done 3A studios have a lot more people to polish it into a shining turd, or diamond. Indie studios don’t get that luxury, it’s either about finding the right VFX / materials / modeler etc consultant, or go alone and “git good” at EVERY ASPECT OF VIDEO GAME MAKING. To sum it up: with any game, you either have a hit in the interactive gameplay (even if it sucks in the pro polish layer vfx animations motion tracking etc) which is programming or visual scripting. Or you don’t! You can polish the core to look good, but if the core is rotten good luck 🍀!! All the best mates!! Never say never ! That is when you should give up 🆙 n your dream of making games NEVER 🎉
@@shaggytoph as the game gets bigger, more variables to test, QA expands to meet the scope and timelines. When the game is shipped what do you do with maybe 100+ testers with nothing to test until the next game is far enough along. Ideally the studio or publisher has a pipeline where people can roll onto the next project but doesn't always work out that way. My recommendation for a career in QA is to expand your knowledge, always learn new areas, improve your tech skills and understanding and be able to pivot into different industries when needed. Games are a great area to get your skills up because they have so much to them so you can learn many domains but it's a tough place to maintain a career long term - pay and job security is much lower than other industries doing similar work.
@@shaggytoph they assure quality. not to say, they're there to tell the teams "I'd not ship it in that stage, I'd think about it again", just for the product to be shipped regardless and to be named in the credits for testing in the worst case - so essentially eating a ton of hate as loads of people somehow blame QA for "saying its fine" when often enough they may even get fully ignored.
@@Unknown_Genius Someone once said that you can't assure quality. Because you can't measure quality. YOu can measure quantity, though. So perhaps that's why we end up with games that have: "Over 1000 Planets!", "Over a Million Lines Of Dialogue!", "100 hours of main story!!", "150 Ammo types", "16 times the detail!!". As if any of that could ever mean the game is good. You can only assure quantity, not quality.
@@OrangeNash you can assure quality, what you mean is that you can't advertize it unlike quantity, that's a good point tho "1000 planets" is way better marketing than "Trust us that the quality is good altho we don't have 1000 planets".
This doesn't exist only in Game Development. Progamming in all enterprise sectors has gotten like this, the last years. My personal opinion is that bad management is mostly to blame for that. As devs are being blamed for missing deadlines and/or other work related issues, the defence (caution) increases proportionally. Even if you yourself aren't a bad manager, past experiences and/or stories build this up. [Spiros/Reckless]
Even as someone who manages other people I see people on my team not taking risks I would’ve taken before being raised to management. Management can’t take all the blame on this one
Risk taking is a cultural issue. Management sets the culture. If you want people to take risks, you have to make sure they know you're not going to rip them to shreds if they fuck up.
@@Deliriumend this guy in his work environment was way more lenient than he needed to be. His programmers threatened to leave over a whiteboard. He gave them 2 weeks on code that would take 45 mins. If it's a societal problem. Maybe our programmers are learning in college to put in minimal effort and glide through their salary.
What we've been seeing is people who have never played a video game in their lives buying into game companies and dictating what they do. They pump money into dead on arrival projects that may or may not ever be completed and when they realise they have no market for these projects, a whole chain of layoffs and closures ripple through the entire company and its subsidiaries. As a developer you can do everything right and make great games, but if you're owned by people who have no idea what they're doing then all of a sudden your next project could be your last.
We are also seeing a lot more people playing games who weren't playing in the 1990's and 2000's. People who like their games to be more cinematic and less challenging. I call them "run to next cut scene" games. Ubisoft, basically, but there's loads more. Even Bethesda are strongly influenced by it now. Less challenging RPG mechanics, just "follow quest marker. get reward". Thankfully, there are still many actual games, such as Factorio, Satisfactory, Slay the Spire, Don't Starve, Crusader Kings, Civilisation etc etc It's just that too many , video games seem to begin and end with "interactive movie" and they are the games that are often the worst produced right now. Though that's subjective - this new generation of gamer laps them up by the million of course!
I think big teams or things that are incredibly structured/process driven run into this. Team gets big, no longer have the average level of expertise or trust you used to, things get turned into soulless process docs. You get a task, think it will take you 1 work day, but realize if you run into something unexpected it may take a week. If you put 1 day on a estimate, and you miss, you affect your performance review. If you put 1 week, do it in a day, your metrics look great! Bad KPIs/incentives screw stuff up. Small teams where you can trust people to just do a thing are so much more productive on a per worker basis.
I was very lucky to have a game dev professor at UCSC who warned all his students that this is the life of working for a triple A game dev studio. Avoided the industry like the plague despite majoring in game design, turned out to be an amazing hobby and now I work for a mid sized software company and have so much more freedom than I ever would have imagined
Yeah, that's also my story exactly. If I love doing something, why would I let a corporation destroy that for me? It's like making yourself financially dependent on producing music, just because you love doing it - not always the best idea, if you have other options.
I've seen similar caution in completely non-gaming adjacent industries as well that started springing up around 2010 and it used to drive me mad. It's a skill in itself to learn to navigate with and around this while not getting bitter or taking it out on juniors as this is all they know. Great insight as usual.
Oustanding video and perspective, Tim. I retired from the USAF last year. My mentors taught me the same principles you described here, only in the fighter aircraft generation field. Over the years I took part in many aggreesive debates concerning management of a fleet of aircraft or warfighting. These debates were always full of passion, but never personal. We were all trying to get to a better place even though many disagreements were encountered. The key was they were never personal. My main lesson for the new generation is to develop your emotional intelligence. Strive to be even keeled, avoid the temptations of apathy and misplaced anger. Life is good and work is rewarding if you allow it to be. I'd work with or for you anytime on anything because the accountable environment you seem to create is one I love and where I thrive.
Hey Tim, I work in the non-game segment of software development. We see expanding time estimates as well and I think it's a push back against being measured. People pad because it's really hard to shut someone down after you've agreed to an estimate, and they go on to change the scope. We've all had our share of one line Jira tickets that that have ballooned in complexity as new requirements have been "discovered".
This same thought process feeds into all other industries too. As a freelancer the battle of ensuring you don't sell yourself short when estimating a project can make or break you 😂 as you say it can be difficult to account for the entire process accurately hence the padding of time 😅 😊
I second this. Not software development but mechanical engineering here. Especially in the early stages of design some parameters have been identified but more come to the surface as development progresses. Yet in a professional environment we like to assign time constraints as cost and lead time is something a customer is mostly concerned about. It can be a difficult process to keep a project contained in the early stages to ensure the solution that is being developed is worth pursuing.
the biggest problem is that a lot of us has been burnt by this same process. you can in meeting give optimist best case scenario estimate and insist that they are just that only for the counterpart to come at you later mad treating said estimate as a legally binding agreement under the worst possible conditions. they just remember the number you spewed not the context of it. I think it come down to knowing who you're interacting with, their background, level of technical awareness and their personality, which is harder in bigger companies. another thing that I noticed that produce this kind of frustration is 'leaky information middle men(s)', say a manager or product owner or other related roles who doesn't know which questions are worth asking, what's worth remembering and communicating and whats worth filtering. a lot of the time you'll find yourself saying that said project would be a lot faster it and better quality if you didn't have to go through them and just ask directly.
@@ive3336 yeah. which is why I thought you where supposed to always give your self more time than what you think you would need. But it seems like everyone in both of these comment sections want to do away with that advice. which seems dumb to me.
This video was discussed in r/gamedev reddit as well and they didn't take this friendly at all. Their takes and ideas were poor communications, toxic work culture, skipping queues, unmaintainable code injection etc.
my biggest takeaway after this is just that i need to keep pushing with my own game projects, honestly. thought inducing, but also weirdly inspirational. thank you for the video about your insights, we're all forever in debt for your contributions to the game world ❤
I definitely noticed this while being at a game development school. There was a constant push for meetings to talk about every little thing and using soft gloves for handling development problems. I recall one meeting in particular where my group had to pick a reference game and despite having talked about the topic for several days, the meeting still lasted for several hours with zero movement happening, yet we still had a bunch of notes that needed to be written. When I saw how bad the mood got I just decided that enough was enough and took over as the typewriter. We finished the meeting in less than half an hour after that. There is very little risk taking nowadays that is driven by passion. I'd like to see more of that too.
You reminded me of something my father told me about management. He said "sometimes when you are in a leadership position it is more important that you make a decision than to make the "right" decision". His point being that you can't let mulling over a decision paralyze the team into inaction. This becomes even more important when time is a resource that you can run out of.
Reminds me of when I worked on a team project a few months ago in college for Game Design... I took on the role of team lead because nobody else wanted to. I hated it. They wanted to have at least one meeting a day to talk about our project and with 2 people not pulling their own weight or asking questions to clarify things, we almost didn't pass. I tried so hard to get people to speak up and share their thoughts and ideas, but they wouldn't. I had to reach out to our professor several times to step in because I didn't want to fail the class. But yeah, nobody wants to take risks, even when those risks are so small. It's like trying to get a child to eat vegetables, but these are adults. I don't get it.
@@Valecan I remember this from Band of Brothers, where a commanding officer got everyone killed not by making the wrong decision, but by making no decision - which was always worse than even the wrong decision
@@Araphex I was part of a group project in college, with 3 others. I dont rememver the 3rd bc they were so silent. The other two were young girls (kids, basically) while I was a fully grown adult. We decided collectively to meet after class every day, to work on the group project. The first two meetings were useless, got nowhere, and both girls just wanted to gossip and discuss girl talk. So I'd leave whenever they would start that, as I asked if were done. Then they assigned parts to the project. Then they said they were having a friday meeting at a fast food restaurant jn the evening. I told them I wasnt coming bc that was late notice and we already agreed to meet after class. The evening didnt work bc I was an adult with adult responsibilities like a Job in the evening. I already explaines that, when we agreed only to meet immediately after class when I had a free hour before my next course. They just got angry and accused me of being lazy and not caring about the project. They said something juvenile about how I essentially wasnt passionate about the project bc I would leave early every meeting (I didnt stay to listen to them talk about boys after they did so for 20 minutes each time and then said it's fine if I leave since we were done). I said I already did my written part we agreed on and submitted it to them already. They later said it was not correct bc they changed directions at the fast food meeting. I told them I was an adult and sent the professor an email. They threatened back they will also talk to him about me being a problem. The ironic part is the leader who was so nasty, didnt do any writing. They agreed with themselves that they would both do the presentation portion together, half and half, so me and the other did all the actual writing. Convenient laziness. Needless to say, the Professor was a 50 year old adult. Not an 18 to 20-something year old childish little girl. I just emailed him saying they, like teenagers, just walked to talk about guys they were dating, but I did my part. I explained the situation and their threats, in case they wanted to lie. Professor laughed at the situation and told me he understands, and to turn in what I had and do a presentation on it alone. Easiest A I ever made. No clue what they said, but I suspect he didnt favor the gossipping children who almost certainly lied to him. All I know is she was especially pissed bc the professor said she had to rewrite my portion (or else it's plagiarism) bc she told me she wasnt allowed to use my work and got angry she had to rewrite it bc I was such a dramatic problem. Hilarious! A lot of people dont want to pull their own weight or are so juvenile they act like children when you just want to put in your dues.
The term I've heard using for that is "analysis paralysis". I've worked on projects where the "analysis" portion took way too long and prototyping was seen as a part of development, not a part of proof. What usually adds to that is people that think "good criticism" is "finding reasons not to do something". People who desperately cling to "holes" they found in a design feature as reasons to prolong the analysis, not understanding that sometimes things have pros and cons - and its the game design pillars that tell you the pros are worth the cons.
it feels to me like a lot of people today are motivated by thinking they or their work has to be perfect. like there's a lot of pressure on people, and kids...
Well, I would say that "analysis paralysis" is not about this case. Here a manager comes up with an idea, explains it (it doesn't look like there was any discussion or analysis), and asks a random dev over their TL's head to implement it in the next several hours. I think paralysis is coming not from the dev in this case.
We live in a fear driven society. A house with fear cannot live side by side with love (passion/creativity/true connections with others). Fear always keeps us chained. We believe things will get better, but it won’t when fear is the foundation for whatever you do in life. Fear lives on a fictional story. A story that has no ending. A story of selfishness and greed. So let’s try to stop this society of fear. Start with small things in your life.❤
Terrific stuff! Started gaming at around 1993-4, and for many years I truly felt like game developers actually talking to me via the game. I felt like they are my older friends, and the games were made for me. With so much years of gaming, I - like many "old time" gamers, so experienced in games, that I can often tell my kids where and when things in their game will happen BEFORE they get there. I know games, I feel games, and I can read how the game was done. And what I see in most of today's big games - is sad, worrisome and sometimes disgusting. Maybe once or twice I considered a thought that its just me - you know, the usual "nah, its just you getting older, grumpier and just stupider. Its only nostalgia talking" -- all that stuff. But no - I know myself, and I trust in my common sense enough to see that its AAA companies and journo-suckups that are problematic, not my view. And to see it pretty much confirmed by industry's legend - is truly a blessing. Timothy, DesignerDave - and I believe others will appear soon. Thank you for great games of our youth, and thank you for being honest!
Incredible. Being an amateur developer with only a couple of hobby projects that has nothing to do with gaming, i started how to do the code for the combat AI in the time you were explaining it. Can't believe 4 weeks would ever be the timeline for that!
Your stories about yelling with Leonard remind me of Richard Feynman. He talks a lot about not being intimidated by other physicists-he was like 24 when he started working at Los Alamos, and he would happily jump into any conversation happening around him and was fearless about calling an idea stupid or impractical. Apparently Niels Bohr took note and noticed that Feynman was the only one who would push back on his ideas, and started specifically asking for him to be included in discussions. He wasn't causing drama-he was getting stuff done. Sounds like those meetings (and yours) were lots of fun. You also make an excellent point about journalism. Reviews are not nearly as good now. They tend to focus on the same elements, they criticize things I generally don't care about (frametrates), and they give lower scores to games that fail a benchmark, regardless of whether the game is any good or not. Exoprimal got savaged in reviews, and it's one of the best games I've played this year. Not sure what the answer is here, but I hope journalism finds a way out of that, because I think the long-term feedback loop of that will result in games that are bland and much less fun (but can hit 120fps at 4k, wooo).
This creates more opportunities for indies. If it takes the AAA people 4 weeks to do an hours work, then even their massive army of workers may not be able to complete with a solid, well rounded, indie developer.
But AAA still have the lion's share of the market, due to the fact they have the marketing power and ability to manipulate the hype machine. Look at Starfield, arguably Bethesda's weakest game so far, absolutely reeking of the 'development caution' problems discussed in this vid. But they a) are Bethesda and fanboys will always buy their product no matter what, b) they're owned by Microsoft, who can spend $millions in marketing and expertly generating hype.
As a director of software development, I wholeheartedly agree with you on the points regarding padded estimates and a lack of accountability. It is applicable to ALL of software development, not just video games. Engineers are incredibly well compensated because their jobs are not easy. However, somewhere along the way, the industry developed a sense of entitlement. There is this sentiment held by the majority of engineers that they are only obligated to work at 50% capacity, while being compensated at 200% the base salary of most workers with a college degree. To be clear, this doesn't apply to all developers. That said, it has become a cultural norm. The more established your company, the more prevalent this attitude becomes. This video helped remind me that I'm not crazy. If you quote 2 weeks for something that I could write in a day, there is a problem.
Not sure, but I've been in gaming and this feels a bit biased. I get Tim’s points, but let’s talk about the other side too. 1) If a team is using Jira for tasks and bugs, adding a whiteboard will cause fragmentation. They already prioritize in Jira, so a whiteboard just splits focus. Having a top 10 list that producers check and assign to their teams seems more logical. Instead of you the director chasing each dev down, which is wierd in large teams where you don’t know every dev personally. The producers come in and help bridge the gap between directors and devs. In smaler teams where you know each dev, it's easier to talk to each one personally. But with the director role, and large teams, people are going to look at you differently. Did you know the programmers on a more personal level? 2) Some code may be quick to write, but fitting it into existing systems takes time. I'm guessing the team was using UE4 and had their workflow and pre built systems in place. Adding unit tests, QA, etc., it all adds up. So, you might have gotten your quick fix, but it seems like you might be a bit tough to work with, and thus not hearing about the ripple effects of the change. 3) Passionate meetings. Nah, I got nothing here. Fully agree with Tim here!😂
I miss the spirit of the era of gaming around 2000. There were a lot of interesting ideas from big developers - Sacrifice, Typing of the Dead, Majesty. I'm not sure we'll ever see a AAA game with that kind of experimentation again anytime soon. I guess maybe tastes have changed, but I think the caution you're talking about here is also a good explanation.
Unfortunately there's a lot fewer new ideas to do. Since around 2000 it was already hard to come up with a unique new concepts for games. 20years later and it's even harder. It's hard when you pitch what you think is a new idea, and it gets shot down with "[insert game] did that already."
@@renaigh People like you are as bad as people who complain that modern games suck compared to older games. There was plenty of trash to go around in every generation of gaming. If you think Typing of the Dead was "shitty" there's something wrong with your sense of fun. My typing speed is still really fast, because of that game. Since it was a good typing tutor that was addictively fun and hilarious in nature at the same time.
@natsume-hime2473 originality is over rated imo. There hasn't been an original story since Gilgamesh, and even that's probably based on pre-existing oral storytelling. Just give me believable characters and a well told story and I'm happy. (This is coming from a writing perspective, not game dev)
Thanks for the reminder on Sacrifice. I have fond memories of muddling my adolescent self through that game and getting turbo stuck on the final level. I’d kill for a spiritual successor.
Frankly I think software development projects have simply bloated to a point where this kind of thing is inevitable. Small teams could make amazing games even in technical sense back in the 90's and early 00's. It would be neat to see if people could accept less demanding assets, if it meant that games could come out with features in and bugs out within 2 years.
Players will absolutely accept less graphical assets. Look how hard battlebit is popping off. Most devs don't seem to have the ingenuity required to develop polished game mechanics that are required to succeed without graphics carrying incompetency.
To an extent yes, but keep in mind that you're probably comparing average games of today to the best games from the 90's / early 00's. After all, you're not even remembering an average game from 30 years ago, because why would you? If you compare the best games from the 90's to the best games of today, you might say "well Baldur's Gate 3 is an amazing game, we're not doing so bad."
I remember taking a look into the development cycles of some of my favourite games as a kid and being blown away compared to games today. For example, the original Ratchet and Clank went from pre-production to release in 20 months with a team of 40. Ratchet and Clank 2 had a 10 month development cycle where the team grew to 80 people.
@@hawtlava Dark Age of Camelot was created on a 4mil budget by 30 peoppe in 18 months, and it was a massive 3 realm 40 class MMO with PvE, PvP Battlegrounds, and epic innovative RvRvR on a massive world map.
I think you brilliantly articulated the problem of modern games: there's just no soul. I can go back and play many games from the 90s/00's where you can feel the passion from the development teams oozing directly into the experience.
@@SiborgGamersome are great, and many just use recycled assets from an engine’s digital store page. And it’s crazy because some of these are praised. Look at Tunic. Total rip-off in many ways from different games and gets tons of praise. So then the next indie dev will do the same thing
@@pt8292 lmao what? what's wrong with Tunic? why dismiss it as "a total rip-off" from other games? are Hollow knight or Blasphemous rip-offs too? how about something like Songs of Conquest? is that just a rip-off of Heros of Might and magic?
I can relate to Tim's stories. The most egregious example I have is when I asked our lead programmer for a simple straight line to be drawn between nodes when we were working on a map. He game back with an estimate of three weeks. Three weeks, just to get our engine to render straight lines! Thing is, I learned that this wasn't just caution, it actually WOULD take a considerable amount of time to get that feature into production, because it would have to be merged up into the engine branch and then the engine changed would be pulled back down into our project. And there was a different team working exclusively on the engine. I think a big part of why we're seeing these inflated estimates is not just caution, it's that it ACTUALLY takes long to do them due to needlessly complicated team and project structures. Yes, you need rigid & complex structures in AAA studios with hundreds (or thousands) working on a single game, but when you're a small studio with a project team of under 10 people, copying these structures (because you want to be professional after all!) does more harm than good.
This was my thought. Maybe the simple AI request itself wouldn't be much of a challenge, but with many other changes being worked on simultaneously, it adds a new whole set of logistical issues. If someone else is working on new AI moves, maybe the new AI breaks it, etc. Fallout 1 was made by 15 people, Outer Worlds by 80. If you want game development to be as fluid as before, maybe trim your staff. However, the lead programmer should be able to explain they why it would take 2 weeks...
@@fiskern2241I think that comes down to either one of two things: 1. He’s padding the time so he doesn’t have to do much work and is being called out on it so he can’t come up with a reason. 2. Younger people these days do not know how to communicate their needs and stick up for themselves therefore can’t explain why X can’t get done because of Y.
@@maxpain45678 You forgot 3. They actually do take 3 weeks for a 3 hour task because they are incompetent and dont actually know how to program. FizzBuzz is real.
What really gets me us how poor the lead programmer was at communicating on behalf on his subordinates to his manager. Beyond lacking communication skills, he was downright rude and antagonistic it appears ... at least as the story is remembered. But having had similar issues with managers in thr past, you tend to hold onto such things.
Dude I wanna reach through the screen and give you a big hug. Feeling this so strongly these days and I would even add that caution goes to publishing and investment/acquisition. Fabulous video and it seriously made my week to hear a great industry steward spouting truth.
It is such a breath of fresh air to hear a competent, intelligent expert in the field talk about the problems of the industry. Everyone else is so scared or weak to be honest, that they pretend everything is great and every peer is a perfect, competent genius. I am so tired of the fake civility and the pretending the house being on fire means everything is fine.
I think as players we've always had a suspicion that game dev culture has changed over the years but that little anecdote about how passion over your work is perceived as threatening is really elucidating. Like because your working in a cubicle, caring about your work in that way isn't allowed, both in terms of the work environment (Which presumably became much more proffesional over the years),and the games themselves. It's probably a reflection of the "industry" in games industry being calcified. And in that sense it would be a bit odd to be getting excited over data management or some equivalent because the stakes are percieved to be so low.
The story of you arguing with other devs, not because of anger but from the shear passion of wanting to make the game better, reminds me of the final panel interview to my first job in games, some years back. The lead dev and CTO got into a heated argument about how to properly implement a serializer. I was soooo tickled by that. I was laughing so hard my eyes started to water. They apparently found my reaction to the situation very endearing, because the next business day (interview was on Friday followed by a holiday weekend). I had a job offer from them in my email. 😂 Part of the reason why I left my last job in games (not the one I spoke of above, but another) was because of how massively siloed design and engineering was. I felt my creativity so deeply constricted. Despite the fact that the team was relatively small and started off as an indie. Most of the decisions were being pushed by Niantic. Bit by bit Niantic began to chisel our game into essentially another PoGo game with a Transformers wrapper. For the last few years I have been building my own game and is my hope to turn this venture into a proper team/studio one day. Nothing comes close to that level of freedom. Building games to me is truly an art, a means by which devs can express themselves. If you can't express yourself in your work, there is no point.
The stories are so fascinating please give us more. It's extremely rare that we get a look into the workplace dynamics of tech/creative industries for large projects like yours.
i long for the day i see a former Rockstar dev talk about game development there. haven't found anything. I did just watch former BGS devs talk about their work on Skyrim. Look up Skyrim Documentary Finally Awake
I would also love him to invite developers he shitted all over and let them say something. Just from his speech, I found way too many red flags. I have a feeling that HE was the main issue there.
This line: 7:17 'games have gone from being an expression of an idea like artwork from a particular person or group of people into a corporate driven money-seeking instrument'. That line is fundamental. Great channel. I have gotten more into gave development recently, this really helps me
The 2nd story he told is ridiculous. I'm a high school dropout who taught himself to program on his own time, no job in the industry, a passing hobby. The code he wants; takes 2 minutes to write in psuedo, maybe 10-30 minutes to plug it into the actual code base with the actual parameters. if (name not in aggro_list) { aggro_list.add(name) self .health -= name.damage } else { self .health -= name.damage } Keep in mind, I don't know what the actual names are, because it's a hypothetical, so the actual variables would be different, but this is essentially the code that he wanted added. It took 2 minutes to write...SERIOUSLY. To add insult to injury, I'm a dropout whose best job was delivering pizza. If the programmers on team can't do this, they need to be fired. The above code I'd put in it's own object, that way I can inherit the system into each enemy, and adjust the system by itself without getting spaghetti code. (I added a space to self .health because it will load a website link otherwise.)
I work in an engineer for a large complicated system involving hardware and software development. You have hit the nail on the head, i think these are really astute observations that apply to any sort of development/engineering environment
The biggest lesson I’ve gleaned from this, is that I should focus on hiring hungry, new devs instead of experienced ones, because those experienced ones are going to abjectly waste my time and money on a work ethic that was shaped by a corporation
I've been a designer myself for the past 6 years, in the industry for nearly 10. Unfortunately what you describe is all I know, and it's hard to stay invested in what I'm doing when I see this kind of mentality surrounding me. I've just moved to a small indie studio of only 3 people (excluding myself) so I'm hoping it will be more like the game development of old, where I get to experience what you and our game dev ancestors had. I want heated discussions because in my experience that's how the product flourishes. Not a cold, passive aggressive teams meeting where everyone hold their cards to their chest. Thanks for this video Timothy, it has affirmed some thoughts I've been having and helped me to understand that it doesn't need to be this way.
This perfectly articulates what I think is a problem with a lot entertainment. There's this need to have a 'rule-set' for everything, there are stats and data that lead to predictable outcomes, everything has been studied and has a distinct process, which in turn has lead to so many games and movies made on insane budgets religiously following 'predictable-outcomes' leading to being generic. Everyone's following the rules to the letter, without, as you say risking an idea they're not sure on how it will perform. But this is only on the top, because yes the indie space is where the true expression and art of video games can be explored. Seriously so many awesome games now.
This speaks to me of my days at IBM. I'm a very experienced Java developer, and when I joined, I was asked to provide coding time estimates. I gave what I thought were reasonable estimates for simple stuff, and I immediately got into huge trouble with management. It turned out (and it took me too long to realise this) that whoever asked for the estimate actually had not idea how software development worked, yet their job title indicated that they knew what they were doing. But they certainly did not! They only wanted massively padded estimates. Ridiculously padded. That was just the "IBM" way of doing things! I'm surprised I lasted 2 years there. The only way to get anything started, even simple things, was to somehow figure out what your manager wanted and then tell them exactly what they wanted to hear. And if anything did get done ... it took almost forever to actually do it!
I work in IT and this happens there too. In my industry it's because management is increasingly threatening people's jobs for making decisions on their own and working hard. You have to do everything their way and if you don't you could be on the chopping block. Therefore you have to run everything by management or you get the wrong kind of attention.
Amazing how much disconnect there is. If you want make money selling games. It’s pretty simple. Guys like cars, explosions, and attractive women. We want games about men who like to get $h!t done, developed by men who like to get $h!t done.
So I have a few critiques as someone who's worked engineering projects as a worker bee in a sense in today's setting. Now my experience is in mechanical engineering not in coding but I think in terms of project development and management it mostly works to the same process. Story 1: I actually agree with you on this one, maintaining a whiteboard of unfinished tasks is pretty normal and honestly a lot of people I worked with kept a whiteboard on a cubicle wall with their tasks to be crossed off. Anyone could see those lists pretty easily and it made communicating with the boss and teammates easier. It does seem a bit odd to me that it would be contentious but oh well. Story 2: I'm not sure what the experience level of your coworker was when they wanted 4 weeks but clearly it was less than you. Sure you may have written this code 3 times but sounds like chances are they never have so they don't know how long it will take THEM when they account for other tasks they have to do or when they account for how it needs to be implemented in their experience. Personally I've had too many times the old guys will come up and say "this is how we used to do it its so simple" when they haven't actually done the same type of work in over a decade because thats not their job anymore. If you want to pass down how you think it should be done that is a good thing. Send them an example of your past work for them to copy or learn from, or hell if it only takes 45 minutes and you can do it like you said...DO IT and say "I want something like this"... this is how you mentor people and pass down knowledge and experience. Give them a day or so to look at it and then ask their thoughts. What you are describing though is a hostile learning environment where you set an expectation with no flexibility for learning and you will be frustrated if it's not exactly how you wanted it and knock performance review points if thats the case. Story 3: This one isn't so bad except you seem to have an expectation that people would want to join in. Truth is very few younger employees are ever going to be comfortable joining in an argument with the old hats, there is too much at risk for their career. You can't expect them to feel comfortable arguing like that without fostering it first. One way I've had teams foster a healthy dose of this is we would have the more senior (but still non-supervisory) team members setup informal group meetings once a week, so think about 10-15 people lead by guys with like maybe 5-10 years of experience with the rest of the group ranging from 0-5. We would sit for about an hour or however long seemed to make sense and just talk about what we were working on with NO bosses/supervisors/managers whatever you call them in the room. This helped filter down discussion in a relaxed environment and made less confident employees more confident in speaking about their projects. It also helped spread knowledge and experience we each had with our very varied and different projects, keeping us all in the loop. This was particularly helpful since our group was essentially the "miscellaneous projects" group and we needed to have a lot of flexibility and wide breadth of knowledge to function due to a lack of specialization.
Been teaching for college for 20 years. Your insight into why the newbies might be afraid was thought provoking. It makes me question if our feelings first education system is actually making more resilient workers.
Also for the coding example, there are usually a lot of factors to consider, especially in bigger teams code structure needs to be unified so everyone is on the same page and not only one of the devs have a clue what the code is suppose to do and how it works. Thats why "i have done it in 45 minutes" might be true, but have you done it in a way that all other devs can work with it? is it documented so people know what it does when you leave the company? is it low enough stress on game performance? i really can see the frustration when you come from smaller teams, like "i just did it in the past and in an hour it was done", but if you have 100 devs on a project and everybody would just do what they want it would turn into chaos eventually. Thats why the indie sector will maintain to be THE space for new ideas. But also customers changed, nice game design is not what 90% of gamers actually want, they will buy the 100th COD or FIFA as long as presentation is top notch, try selliing slay the spire to to the masses. So tripple A in its current form means, big investment needs to make sure you get your money back, and since innovative game design is like bottom of the bucket for most customers, they leave that to the indie market and just take the ideas from them and put the money into presentation and accessability - So in the end it does not matter, there are games for everybody and new ideas will eventually reach even tripple a even though they where not created by them, but still there is plenty of innovation, plenty of good quality games, but you just have to pick where you are looking nowadays
@@dennisvogel5982 The example he gave though is so simple that it could definitely be done in a way usable by everyone in under an hour. It's: - add a data structure to the base AI entity - update it whenever the entity is attacked, referencing the attacking entity - sort and sample the list when choosing targets That's probably 15-30 lines max, depending on how you do the sorting. 45 minutes for this is completely fair for anyone on the team (I would've guessed 20 minutes). If you've written it before, it would be under 10. Maybe you could stretch it out to a day for someone completely unfamiliar with the code base and who's kinda bad at programming and who's distracted by a bunch of meetings throughout the day. 4 weeks is just inexcusably absurd. Anyone who takes that long on this should be fired. I also don't like that you brought up documentation as an element that would add a bunch of time for this task. The documentation for this isn't needed since any decent naming convention would immediately make it's use clear, and it's completely encapsulated by the AI entity. If it was needed for some reason that I'm missing, it would take 5 minutes.
@@La0bouchere its wasnt exactly for this specific case but in general a lot of work gets forgotten, when a statement is made "this will just take 5 minutes" - heard it a lot, while working in the industry and its 99% of the time not true. When doing prototyping and stuff like that, it might be true but once you are reaching 50 or more people working on a project you cannot just simply "code something" What if that specific call you want to just dump a lot of data into, several weeks in the future is designated to be limited - for example only every second hits get checked, instead of every individual hit ..... suddenly parameters changed and stuff stops working - maybe because the call itself was designed to be changeable in that way, did mister "it takes 5 minutes" check with the departments? usually he has not, so now you have to write a whole new call to dump the code into -.... and this might not be your decision but another department has to make that -suddenly you doubled the calls for each hit - is that sustainable from the server architechture? - this is a bad but kind of pratical example why you do not just code something. - So if you are in the end responsible for delivering on time, you check for everything that could happen and make sure it does not go wrong because in the end it is your responsibility to give estimates that work. if its quicker, and you have time left, nice - but there is nothing worse for planning than give estimates that are too low. in the end the situation is as follows - if you say 4 weeks and do it in 5 minutes everything is fine - when you say 5 minutes and need 4 weeks you have to explain a whole lot or might lose your job in the worst case, because that guy that wanted to work with your code now cannot - setting off a chain reaction, that might even shift release dates blowing millions of marketing budget. That is simply not the case when you are 3 dudes in a garage and you are the dude that codes 90% of the game - you know the code, you are the only one that NEEDS to know the code, you have a good enough grasp what and why this call exists and if anything is planned to do with it in the future. There is no other developer waiting on your code. You have not planned 3 years ahead with user story after user story that each have estimates and depend on each other. you do not have billboards on time square rented for your release date. You have not rented hollywood superstars to be in your tv commercials..... i could write another book about documentation, but believe me, its needed - so i leave it be at this point. i know what he wants to say and yes its frustrating - you can prototype a running game in a few days with all gameplay relevant systems running these days - but once it gets to production stuff slows down, doubeling team size will only give you about 50% faster production a lot of times but its needed to handle the sheer size of games nowadays. then everything needs to be documented and coded in a way that its easy to handle because live service and patches are the norm. its not commom practice to do things that way because nobody wants to work - its the procedure everybody comes back to after a lot of different approaches failed and i know that from experience
Remember that the only people with parachutes are fighter pilots and CEOs. It sounds like "cover your a$$" work style. That suggests that the workers are VERY concerned about giving the "leaders" ANY reason to put them on the chopping block. No one wants to have even the tiniest mistake on their record/reputation. They're just trying to stay employed.
Oh Tim, if only you knew. All software development is like that. This attitude is a response to metrics and corporate meddling. Managers that have no idea how software works end up telling developers how to do their work. So they end up padding everything because they don't want to be held accountable for something that's often trying to fit a square peg into a circle.
@@josedeleon1923 Take a look at how Mashiro Sakurai describes the role of video game director and his project management advice in general. I'm coming to realize it's all advice western game directors will really need.
Absolutely. I'm an engineering team lead and half of my job is just listening to the C-suite rant about features that we're missing or that don't do what they should, despite the fact that all we do is exactly what the C-suite tells us to do. So I give them bullshit estimates, we get the work done in half the time (if not less), and then when they reactively pivot to something else, we can redo it and still meet the original timeline. It's the stupidest game.
@@DdavidoffC something I never realized before entering the corporate world is how there are really two types of “driven” people. Entrepreneurs who want to start their own company and be successful. And followers who want to get paid good money to do what they’re told. The problem is, the highest decision makers on any project are the second type of person, and that’s never the type of person you want running a serious project.
Thank you so much for your videos, Tim. They have helped me a lot on reflecting on my own design process. Also thank you for your work in general. Fallout was incredibly influential in my way of thinking growing up, and it is one of the first pieces of art that made me gain an affinity for anarchism and degrowth, which had been guiding principles in my work since.
Loved this! It was like I was listening to my double, but from a tech industry point of view. I used the exact same processes with the whiteboard priority approach, the passionate meetings (intense solution initiatives), pseudo code walkthroughs to support rapid prototyping so we could quickly explore yay/nay decision making, constant end user stakeholder engagement to maintain buy in ensuring support staff feel part of the product and feel responsible for its success. I started to realise I was quickly becoming what is probably now referred to as a "Generalist" and my approach was now at odds with the industry standards that support very specific roles to support planning and scale, but often lead to excessive bureacracy and caution. A generalist drives a car, but the new industry standards would have somebody responsible for the steering wheel, and another responsible for the gearstick etc. The industry is sold on this approach thinking it ensures accountability and redundancy, but in reality it often just leads to an increase in bottlenecks and a rapid loss of product value and money. Funny thing, I also moved my whiteboard approach to many confluence pages that for a long time where met with indifference but I see they are now being used for insights and inspiration, years later.
I'm a game programmer with many years of experience and am asked to give estimates to my producers. It is so common for them to simply double whatever I tell them. I don't argue anymore.
I think a lot of the fire of the early developers has been lost. I like moving quickly but if I try that within a company, it doesn't go over well. People want to plan, and schedule, and meet, and spec, and document, and ... I mean, everything other than write code and/or prototype. Which are the 2 fastest ways I know to get something done and evaluated.
As an SWE 5 years into my career, I've often padded my dev estimates (although obv. 4 weeks is excessive) because of the following experiences: I say 5 days, it takes 6, I end up having to explain to the PM "What went wrong", as if an estimate off by one day is a sign of a problem I get a spec/ticket that's one sentence. I ask for more info, I get told to "just work it out." So I give a padded estimate to account for ambiguity, because I KNOW there will be scope creep, although can you really even call one sentence a scope? I say 5 days, its ready for QA in 2, QA is under-resourced, it takes them 5 days to get to it. Now I'm having a conversation about how to improve my estimates because it's not production ready in 5 days. Obv. these are anecdotal, and I'm not advocating for padding estimates as a rule, but I've had so many of the above experiences that when I'm in a work environment where the above experiences have happened, I become, as you say, very cautious
As a software engineer I feel like every year I get less productive (across different employers, industries and customers). More caution, more process, more tools, more everything to get the simplest change implemented. For every $1 spent it requires like $0.80 guaranteed in overhead just to avoid even the smallest amount of risk or responsibility. And it's not even helping, if everything gets so difficult that nobody wants to fix problems or try different solutions the software gets worse in the end.
It's not caution; you're helping to BLOW THE WHISLTE on a job market issue we're ALL seeing. Especially at places where corporate HR are removing so many rules people are able to act like children in a world of adults (hyperbole, but we're not far off now). This is also why Hollywood finds it so hard to make a movie while budgets are astronomical... - A Fellow Dev💚
@@RichardHoelscher Since you're clearly not in the industry (or new to it) - you already get that. Your portfolio allows you to negotiate more pay there or at your next job. When a project does well YOU do well too. Not being guarenteed a job is part of the industry because mobility is a PERK of the industry...
@@MrTickleTrunkwell can go both ways I see the point that was brought up a lot too with people not wanting their name listed since they can receive backlash for a poor project which id hope someone wouldn’t want to update their portfolio with. Tough industry working on eggshells
@@answering248 Not wanting your name on something means it's WAY too bad. But you can take that as a loss and move on to the next project... also that's only a concern on AAA projects - most of the industry is not large studios. They just make tentpole games...
@@RichardHoelscher This doesn't happen in tech, employees have a massive amount of bargaining power and mobility. It's standard to go interview at a different company, get an offer, and use it to demand a raise for your current job.
This is why i enjoy Indie gaming (despite working at a huge game studio). Allows me to focus on my core audience, given them what they expect or want but also have the possibility to drive the game mechanics, the story and other aspect of development however we please.
I love these stories. I had the same experience and ended up writing the module myself because the "developer" said it would take 3 weeks. I wrote it in one afternoon and it never came back with any bugs. This is generally why I don't work with people anymore and just do game jams. I set my own pace and enjoy development rather than deal with mythical deadlines and egos.
I think indie games have more investment in their product and they are stiving for more from a place of less. Most of that striving has the potential to directly reward them. That is the driving force of their passion. Workers in AAA studios often have good cause to be jaded and not feel like they have a stake in the product's success. In an era where AAA titles can make record profits but still have major layoffs for the sake of the CEO's yacht money they have little reason to care about the success of the product. A feature that takes 4 weeks instead of 2 weeks(or even 40 minutes) is barely a blip in the amount of money a hit game can make for the people at the top. And if the programmer is going to get shitcanned regardless then they might as well milk it for all they can while taking it easy. Maybe spend some of that extra time working on their own projects. I don't know the specific companies in question here. Those are just the optics and the prevailing sentiment among 9-5 office workers, generally. These people aren't cautious. They just aren't passionate and they have good reason not to be. I think the people who stand the most to gain are too far removed from the people actually doing the work to earn the money. Everybody doing the work knows they aren't going to reap a proportional amount of the reward to the amount of effort they put in so they become uninspired and unmotivated. They are there just for the paycheck. And the middle managers are there just to get them to stay on task and get something from them that they can show to their boss and not get fired so they can collect the paycheck, all the way up to the top. All of this, I am specifically speaking about the AI code incident and it possibly has some influence on the optics of having the whiteboard in a public space. I think the yelling incident truly had nothing to do with the other two and you are probably being too quick to make a connection there.
So, first of all, this is a great video with lots of great points. I have been in software development for 27 years and I have seen the changes as well. However, it feels like you are assigning blame on the developers, when there are some clear and obvious reasons for how and why developers have been conditioned to have this caution. 1. The planning fallacy. Humans are terrible estimators and we all know this by now. However, miss a deadline and get skewered for it by management and product owners. 2. The culture of blame. I have seen this in nearly every organization these days. You don't want your name publicly listed or called attention to, because if anything goes wrong management is on the hunt for who to blame, even though the focus should be on how to fix whatever the issue is. 3. Iterating costs money and the C Suite doesn't want to "burn" money. So you stick to the board and look for easier, "proven" features. I could write a dissertation on the many other reasons, but the bottom line is that caution now exists where it didn't used to because leadership has conditioned it into developers.
As a developer I was immediately familiar with the Combat AI story as I was guilty of that kind of thing too more than a few times. I think what happens is that developers all start with the attitude of, yea I can do it in few hours, but inevitably you get your nose bloodied few times and you start quoting for more time and some people even start asking for excessive time. For example, sometimes you say a feature takes few hours to make but then that feature introduces a bug that takes you few hours on its own to fix and it looks like you estimated poorly or don't know what you are doing, or someone asks you for this small random thing and you say yes but they keep changing their mind so in the end 2 hours piece of code takes 2 days because of all the changes, or you say yea I can do it but then your actual line manager says you have to fix this very urgent thing first and at the end of the day it looks like you didn't do this small thing which you promised to do or simply it does happen often times especially in complex codebases where a feature that is very simple on the surface is actually very complex because of all the hidden dependencies or legacy code or such and it looks like you are being unreasonable asking for so much time but actually people just dont know the full scope of everything that is involved. Every developer gets into these situations and eventually they try to get away with asking for as much time as possible just to avoid these painful experiences and yea sometimes people even ask for unreasonable amounts of time. And then as those developers become managers they are just like the manager in your story because they have this attitude of; when I was just a developer I could not push back on all these ridiculous requests but when I will become a manager I will have the power to push back and I will protect my team from all these random requests and get them as much time as I can. People do think that way and sometimes they become unreasonable.
Another difficulty is when black box rules make the bit of code you need to work with hard to access in the new place you want to access it. So like if the Npc aggro list isn't visible to those callbacks yet, then you need to file back up the chain and see where you can inject Aggro-list data - somehow get access to the data in a safe manner, so you can use it in the new location. And that can be a tough restructure if the data isn't already provided.
This reminds of a podcast that Mike Stout and Tony Garcia were part of saying they lament how developers in AAA arent able to make games quicker, in a way playing too safe due to several reasons. From his perspective that leads to less opportunities to learn from mistakes or failures or successes in different games since you're locked in on the same ine for years. As you mentioned games cost more to make, and there was a lot of "bad games" made earlier that now experienced veterans in industry are as great as they are.
This year marks my 49th year programming. I have been doing it professionally since 6 months after I finished college. Your evaluation isn't constrained to games it is everywhere. In a world where your hired for your characteristics over your qualifications has led to destruction.
I can't fathom the first story with the guy saying that it will take 4 weeks to code the aggression table. I mean, I don't work in game development, I'm a tax consultant. But it sounds to me like I receive a basic tax return from a client, as simple as can be, and tell the client it will take a month to get it back to him, when all I would have to do is fill in his information within not even an hour.
Obviously, things shouldn't be this way, but I can definitely see how they could be, as someone who has worked in enterprise software development. I'm not saying all of this is accurate to the exact scenario, I wasn't there, but I can *imagine* how 4 weeks is reasonable. So, you're sitting on a long desk in an open office with a hundred other people. There's weeks, or even months of work scheduled for you and your team to work on, all carefully estimated, organized by "epic" in a tool like Jira. Every 2 weeks, a portion of that scheduled work is pulled in to the current "sprint", a 2-week time box which is meant to give development teams a regular cadence for work and reflection. It's the start of the week, a Sprint Goal has just been set, and you're working on your first task, an infrastructure change that's a blocker for 4 other tasks, meaning those other tasks can't be completed until your current task is completed, tested, integrated and deployed. Someone asks you to make this tiny little change to the code. It's trivial, like 10 lines of pseudocode, it's genuinely not too hard in a vacuum, but you can't start on it right away. If you abandon your current task, you'll be delaying not only your current task, but the 4 other tasks that depend on it. Even if that wasn't the case, the tasks in your sprint have been carefully calculated according to your team's "velocity" to perfectly fill that week, and so if you accept additional tasks, that's likely to cause your team to miss some tasks this sprint. This wouldn't be an issue, except that many companies shortsightedly tie employee and team performance, whether directly or indirectly, to your sprint metrics. Unless the product owner agrees to move some of the currently accepted tasks out of this 2-week sprint to make room, this task will have to wait 2 weeks until the next sprint, and get included then. So we're up to 2 weeks. Next, while the code is simple in theory. Add an entity ID to a table when damage is taken, or increment it's value if it's already there. But any programmer will tell you that even things that look simple can be quite difficult in a big codebase. There are things that are unclear, even with such a simple task. What counts as an entity for this purpose? If the character is damaged by a physics object, how do we know who threw it? If the character is damaged by part of the environment, should that be included as an aggro target? What about accidental friendly-fire? How is the initial target chosen when no damage has been taken? What happens if an entity that's currently in the map disappears or transforms, changing its ID? How do we prevent an enemy from trying to chase another entity on the other side of the world because they were damaged by them a while ago? Also there's the fact that Bill added a hack that treats health packs as entities which do -100 damage, meaning that it's hypothetically possible for an enemy to become aggroed onto a health pack. None of these are insurmountable problems, but they add up, so we need to discuss and properly specify this. Everyone's busy right now, but we'll bring it up at the sprint planning for the next sprint, and then discuss it over a couple of long, boring meetings. +3 days. Ok, now it's not as simple as just writing the 10 lines of code, and done. It needs to be integrated with the game engine itself. This table of entity IDs can be represented by a simple hashmap, which would work just fine, except that the player has the ability to quickload and save at any time. We need to make sure that this map of entity IDs is properly serialized and persisted to the save data, or when the player quickloads, every enemy will lose aggro. Could be +2 days if things are bad. We need to write automated tests for this stuff. Yes, it may just be "temporary", but any programmer knows that the venn diagram of "temporary" changes and things that become permanent parts of the codebase is a complete circle. So we need to give it the high level of code readability, quality and testing that we do for every piece of code. We write automated tests for the table itself, the way it integrates with the scene, the way it interacts with other AI rules, the way it's serialized and deserialized from the save data. Could be +2 days if things are bad. There could be more unknown unknowns, things we don't know about that make implementation more difficult, and I'd usually add some padding time for this. So the code is written, but now it needs to be reviewed by 2 teammates including one senior developer. It'll probably be at least a day before a reviewer even looks at your code (+1 day), and then they leave a comment asking you to change the name of some variable. You do so, but they don't check their emails and re-review the code for another day (+1 day). Then you go through the same thing with the senior developer reviewing your code. They're deep in a complex, fundamental change and can't shift focus, but on the next morning you receive an LGTM (+1 day). Then it goes through QA, which will probably take at least 2 days, probably more, even assuming there are no issues that require rework. Altogether, that adds up to 20 working days, or 4 weeks. Then the team lead has a discussion with the guy and agrees to throw other work out from the sprint and start on it right away, which removes the 2-week delay at the start, bringing it down to 2 weeks. Again, this isn't exactly what was happening in the real world case, I can't know, but in every large development company there's a process to follow, meant to ensure quality and reduce communication issues. Whenever there's a process to follow, every stage in that process introduces some level of delay. How do we get around this? Build small. Small teams can communicate effectively without too much process. Their members all understand the vision of what they're trying to do, so they don't need detailed specifications. A team member with a higher level of personal impact upon a project has a much greater investment in that project's quality and success, and they'll self-enforce quality without the need for a multi-stage review and QA process. Game development is cheaper and easier than it's ever been, and we need fun games made by smaller teams who can work in a truly agile way.
@@Keisuki I respect that you explained a variety of possible bottlenecks with relatively deep examples. I am wondering however, how much time did it take for you to write those paragraphs?
@@danilafoxpro2603 I don't remember, it was a while ago, I type pretty fast though. Management of technical teams is something I care atypically much about, and it's enjoyable to write even if nobody really cares.
Love, i wholeheartedly agree mate. I work in software and im in s very fluid logistics company right now, it's fantastic. If we need to roll out of a hotfix, it can happen tomorrow kind of thing. My previous company was very much not like this. The GM was the tyrant and everything had to go through him, no matter the department. The software was buggy, releases were slow, everyone was stressed and there was so many meetings. To top it off we were owned by a fortune top 500 company who had a painful HR and there was no room for creativity. I love this message
i love jank in games, typically not for the jank itself but for all that charm you mentioned that tends to accompany the jank. it's interesting how the general experience of long time gamers parallels the change in attitudes of developers you talked about. games like Baldurs Gate 3 that have charm and ambition and take risks are beyond uncommon these days
I might be biased here, but damn! S.T.A.L.K.E.R has a lot of jenk but it was so risky at the same time that it created a very unique game with a lot of charm and atmosphere, and I love it for that exact same reason!
People call it jank to shrink responsibility of the product being trash. Starfield is a perfect example, can't go 15minutes without jank breaking my immersion. Jank is acceptable for indie games, not triple A games.
I'd offer that there's a difference between jank broken and buggy. Starfield is more broken or buggy game design. Flying into a planet not doing anything, or merchant inventories being tied to a chest that's hidden somewhere in the world are incomplete design that shouldn't be happening. Like someone asking for a proper vendor system which would take 45 minutes and someone telling them it will take 4 weeks, so they do the workaround instead because the world designers gotta keep going. Neither of them care that people will find it and laugh. They gotta keep trudging along. Jank would be the physics engine in Zelda BotW. It has to work that way for the trials to function. Side effect is that sometimes it can be manipulated to do silly things outside of that confined space. The techniques used in Mario speedrunning can be considered jank. But overall I'd say the more determining factor between jank and broken is whether it's viewed positively/amusing or not by the person playing. @@Wizardi1111
What's interesting to see is how Mashiro Sakurai describes the role of video game director on his RUclips channel. In it, he mentions an avoidance for running opinions over in any democratic or communal manner, but instead opts to take open feedback throughout development, and constantly informs his team of the vision for the project, and personally does a ton of work review - it seemed implied to me that he would have the final say on any particular piece of work. Under that system, I don't see how there can be much development caution. The team works according to the directions vision, who naturally takes all the blame and responsibility for the decisions made and the final work that goes into the project no? Who would there be to run around to debating all day? Is what I though was a standard system that Sakurai was kindly teaching us about, actually unique to his directing style or Japanese culture? I'm curious if there's a real term for it.
I really could not figure out why I could not get into new games. I thought it was my dopamine system that was fried. But then I started playing older games and stayed up all night completely sucked in. I then realized that newer games are just boring, there is no crazy, funny, interesting or surprising stuff going on at all. It’s all the same safe and predictable boredom.
Hey Tim, thanks for sharing this insight. I’m enrolled in a game business program right now and I think this is extremely valuable information for people in the industry to take note of. Helps to hear this at the beginning of my journey!
Sounds like a snowflake problem. If a dude cannot get 45 minutes of work done and needs 4 weeks, fire them. No joke. You'll be surprised by how productive people become when you stop walking on eggshells around them.
Tim, I have a friend who worked on the development team at Carbine. He never had anything but glowing admiration and respect to talk about in regards to you, and I know that team really enjoyed working there, despite small squabbles that might have gone on. It was a special place and sadly a kind of studio that's dying out, as you say.
It's true, but also I don't see much of an alternative. I think the issue is that we have no safety in our (American) society. If you lose your job (or other access to money), you lose everything, quickly. Housing, healthcare, transportation, food, etc. That's why people are so terrified of rocking the boat, because there's no other way to avoid drowning. I think that's why people try to avoid passion in the workplace, because they know its not going to be fullfilling, because taking a risk that could easily result in you losing your job is too high a cliff to jump off of. I can't blame anyone for not caring about their job and making it as easy as possible. Unfortunately, the trade-off is issues like this, but to have the creative society we used to have requires us as a collective to agree to make things safer for everyone, which we haven't decided on doing yet.
yea trying to create art shouldnt make or break you we should be able to freely create and fail if we have to without the repercussions our backwards society imposes
This is why I'm so enamored with VR right now. So many small teams/studios just giving it their all and experimenting. Yea sometimes there's jank and sometimes the games need a bunch of patches but the teams communicate with the player base on discord servers, and you can tell they just want to make the best game they can. Gotta respect it. Nice too that most VR games are $30 or less. Vast majority of AAA gaming bores me to tears, most games are a total step back from stuff we got on the PS2.
One big issue with the VR market is that VR headset manufacturers are trying to create walled gardens in a very niche market. Platform exclusivity only hurts VR.
@@OzzianmanWhich is why I hope Mark cuckerberg and his meta company goes bankrupt and never dare to enter the IT industry ever again. They have done almost irreparable damage to VR gaming as a whole.
I think this was very well put. This is exactly how I felt when I went to University, and after my 2nd full year doing game art and switching from design because I was tired of people not listening to ideas or practical solutions for that matter, covid happened and I just felt like something was wrong with me. In reality though, I'm just passionate, I actually have had to do every role in game dev making 2d and 3d games, both story driven and action. So I know what it's like personally. In the end it broke me down so much that I can't stand working with other people in the game industry. This is honestly sad, and I don't know why it's like this. Why is everyone so sensitive, aren't we all trying to make a game? I have been unwell these past few years but I'm getting back my focus and will produce more games. Thanks for this message.
> Why is everyone so sensitive, aren't we all trying to make a game? Well get cancelled on twitter/X for misrepresentation or objectification or some other bullshit, or get review bombed a couple of times for by infantile "gamers" that are literally looking for a way to be offended, and we can continue talking.
I started in the game industry in 2007, and yes I'm seeing the same. I get why people pad estimates, the "agile" approach and working in sprints and milestones is the main culprit, and leads often don't do anything hands on anymore and are just middle managers
Thank you very, very much, adressing this topic(s). Meanwhile I thought sometimes, that I'm the only one, who has the perception of things going that way. Not only in the games or software industrie as a whole but overall in society. Especially the part where you talked about "yelling at each other without beeing mad, just into it", gave me a big relief because that's my way of discussing topics too. I'm always "very into it" but in the last ten or fifteen years, that as become to be a problem. Glad to not be alone 🙂
I liked this video and the messages behind this video! It's awesome to learn more about the game industry and how it's been evolving over the years. I wish some people and the gaming industry could have a better supportive environment and have more discipline for their work ethic.
This is why the Sega Dreamcast will always be one of my top consoles. Sega took so many risks, developers at the time said the company felt like a AAA indy studio. And as can be expected, it sold so poorly it ran them out of the console space.
Timothy, as a gamer of many years, thank you. This was a fantastic video, great insight, and open and honest which shows your amazing character. I've been gaming since Commadore 64; Fallout was a masterpiece and I'm sad to see where it's fallen short since.
As a software dev/lead/agile guy of 15+ years (not in the games industry) I recognize a lot of what you are describing. At my current job I see a lot of tasks that gets estimated to take 3-5 days which I would knock out in an afternoon when I was a junior dev. I really do dislike peoples aversion to pushback in modern development. Everything is decided by consensus. If you disagree and you want to have a conversation about it. If you do not do it in the right way you're seen as difficult. To me it is perfectly acceptable to have an 30 minutes discussion about a topic. Explore every part of it. And still disagree at the end of it. This makes people uncomfortable. I don't think this inherent to agile workflows but it is a prevailing culture today. That said today I often find things that I would do in 1 hour to take multiple days using modern tools. There is a lot of benefits with modern framework. But everything today is just a lot more complicated and slower. On top of that when I think back to 10 years ago where I worked in a team of 5 developers for the whole organisation vs today. Where I am one out of maybe 100 developers. I feel like I was 10x more productive 10 years ago. Though I will concede the code we produce today is a lot more stable and easier to modify and work with. I think what a lot of people forget in an agile workflow is that top level management can be considered stakeholders. For your 4 week damage table. I'm sure they've internally discussed it within the implementing team. Probably had a vote about how much time it would take. And from how they view the requirements arrived at what they find to be a reasonable estimation. At this point it would be unreasonable for top level management to go in and directly adjust the time estimation and change nothing else. What makes me frustrated when listening to your story is that the other part seems unwilling to engage in why you are saying 45 minutes and they are saying 4 weeks. If I was a team lead in this situation I would first explain the story as I understand it to you and figure out where the misunderstanding is. Then secondly probably discard the story in our log and start over from scratch. Because clearly the scope of the story is wrong. In this case it seems like they've given up on communication and just want to steamroll what they think is right. I think I understand the pushback you got against the whiteboard. To me it sounds like what you want is a classical continous flow kanban board. Basically a trello page. But making a lot of assumptions you are probably high level management. You probably have some sprint based agile workflow adopted. And you are probably working across multiple teams in a big organisation. So in essence what you are saying is that you want to impose a secondary workflow over your existing workflow (provided my assumptions are correct). If I as a mere developer make commitments to my team, my scrum master in a 2 week sprint. And then on top of that. I also have my name directly written on a whiteboard from top level management. It puts me in an extremely awkward spot where I either commit to the sprint goal or to the directives of a manager. I think the solution you ended up doing was probably the best one. You had a list where you clearly communicated what is important. And then product owners and scrum masters looked at that list and planned the sprints accordingly. As to why no one suggested you to do it this way in the first place. I can't understand. I have to agree that I hate the caution today. I don't even think Agile workflow is that effective for large organisations. Its just that we don't have a better option. And the way things are decided these days just takes a lot of passion out of how development decisions gets made. These days its only about delivering bullet points. Even if the person making the decisions has a great visionary idea. It gets broken down, reviewed and reduced to its minimum viable component before anyone even started coding. 10 years ago. We had conversations like. "Hey man, I tried doing this over the weekend. Have a look at this." and that would lead into a defining feature of the product years down the road. There is no room for that among developers in big organisations.
20+ years veteran here. I’d tell you I’ll have it done in 3 days. Brute force done in 1 day, assuming there’s already an event system. Handler just looks it up in a hash map. Day 2 assuming a huge map, add a cache of players in range, such that only 1 player gets added per frame. Day 3 test plus more than enough padding. If a junior or even an intern told me 3 weeks, I’d give him 1 week, and mentor him 1/2 hour a day. Can’t do it myself, the juniors gotta learn or I’ll have to do everything myself.
Managers always shift blame downstream, he says developers don't have passion anymore. But we hear about layoffs and workplace abuse every week. Every time a game is delayed or comes out with bugs we never hear anything about the managers, but developers get harassed online. The risks are not “uh, I gonna get something wrong and the team will be disappointed” anymore. Is more like “I’m gonna get death threts”
As a 3D Artist with almost 9 years of experience I can say this... I remember how excited and full of energy I was when I started my first job in game dev. I was all over the place, hyped, working long hours, trying to be innovative and full of ideas, burning like a torch and you know what? Noone wants you to burn bright like a torch. Noone wants you to be full of ideas, full of energy, innovative and hyped cause for some reason they'll think you're a danger to their status. Game dev is full of jaded old farts who think they are all soooo experienced and all sooo important cause they've been there for years and you're just a noob. They will do everything in their strenghts to extinguish thy flame so that you don't burn brighter than they ever were. If you wanna make it in AAA industry you pretty much have to be jaded just as them and hold your head low so it won't be sticking out too much ready to be shot. All of my ideas were always thrown out to the trash cause "it will take too long", "we don't have a budget for that", "noone at the exec seat will ever agree too that", "it's too unique and risky, we're doing a game for the mass audience", "we just need to stick to what's been done before and is proven to work", "I know you want to be all creative and such, but just follow my order, it will be better this way" yatta yatta yatta.... You get these responses enought times in your carrer and you become just as jaded as them.
" It's too unique and risky, we're doing a game for the mass audience " There it is, the one thing about triple AAA video game developer and publisher that always self destruct itself every damn time, the mass audience goal, they never work and they never learn. 😑
Love the stories. Been doing games since 2005 and definitely feel ya on this. In particular I find its really hard to get people to build the most sketch of a sketch of a feature first. People want to do it "right" but then we almost always change it so much that the time spent on "right" leads to even slower itteration on the next phase because it was built so "solid" for the old spec. Not sure how to change that pattern.
The issue that comes often as the source as why people in a dev team want to do right in such a solid way is from the inability for the team members to segment and extract their work from the project's scope and state. With you example of a sketch of a sketch of a feature, one way of allowing someone to do it right and not too over-the-top-perfect is to request the feature outside of its intended scope. Like requesting that feature to be drawn on a white board without it referring to anything currently in the project. To give somewhat of an example, if you were working on a game that has zombie, if you were to ask a sketch of a sketch of a how the zombie could be generated dynamically when nothing has been done with the zombie and their animation/AI, you would get as many opinion/solution as there are people understanding various point from the game development. If you were to ask the same question when the game actually have zombies in it, you would get many suggestion that would surround what's already build/applied because of the negative aspect that comes from the idea of scrapping what has already been done. Another issue often comes from the education received. Back in the 90's and early 2000's, programming classes were mostly following general conventions/languages that weren't directed toward the gaming industry so anyone had to push and learn the trade and develop their creativity through tries and errors. Then as the video game becomes more popular and more companies start looking for new hires, school started to teach game dev-focused courses with the same structure as the general convention/language course which doesn't give much liberty nor attempts at trials & errors. Teachers teaches and students learns what's taught and that's it. Once the student graduate and is released in the wild, he or she has little to no time to have fun trying and immediately turn to "do perfect first" mode as it was taught at school. (At school, being creative and not following convention/perfectionism results in low score and failure.)
I have heard about these "oh yeah, that will take at least 4 weeks" company dynamics. Sounds horrifying and mindnumbing, sitting there 3.9 weeks doing nothing. I think it comes about when a task is marked as "1 day", it takes 2, then the manager gets angry and demands better estimates. From then on all 1 day tasks are assigned 2 and the problem goes away until one of those 2 day tasks takes 3 and the manager is back. Very weird spiral, which ends in everyone on the team perpetuating a false narrative, lying to themselves and others and watching youtube 90% of their working time. Sounds heavenly to slackers, but your programming skills will atrophy faster than you think. You'll be unemployable after such a job.
@@josephhetzenauer1890 it's the managers' faults that these people even exist. Try and excel in one of these situations and your most likely reward will be more work and responsibility, without a corresponding increase in pay (you only get that when you find a job somewhere else). The best programmers gtfo, and you are left with the mediocrities who don't mind having a soul sucking job working for idiots all day.
@@josephhetzenauer1890 missing the point. it's the managers who made that happen. the guy is saying the programmer can usually do the task in one day but sometimes it takes 2 instead. and when that happens the manager get's super upset thus causing the programmer to now mark all 1 day tasks as 2 day tasks. and then that continues until you have what should be a 1 day task turn into a 4 week task. stuff like this happens in retail too. or at least it did to me. i'd get told to do one thing then while doing that thing I'd get told to go do something else. then later get told off for not doing the original thing
Hey Tim, this is awesome. I work in a very small studio, where we take risks on some pretty off the wall concepts. Like the literal "blink through time" core feature in Before Your Eyes. We test ideas by rapid prototyping and "seeing what sticks" (for ideas too). Saying "bye to your babies" is an everyday thing. Sure, it can sting a little sometimes, but it's all part of the fun - and it's worth it. I think that our being "ok with failure" is what makes our work special. In fact, I know it to be. Having come from an engineering background (micro-electronics), it took some getting used to rapid prototyping: turning ideas into imperfect reality, trying them out, and then tossing them if they don't work. That engineering perfectionism, though, is counterbalanced by excitement and passion. How much fun it is. I feel fortunate working in a small team where ideas and decisions flow quickly. Also, a team that is not afraid to dispute ideas in an impassioned way. I am stoked by what I do, and who I do it with. I work with an incredible group of people who hold each other accountable while being advocates for one another. In the example you shared about the individual who cited 4 weeks, my eyebrows did raise. In our small team, that's just sort of an everyday thing that you might switch to between tasks as a chore for somebody. I also do not take this employees behavior as a sign of competence or ill-will, but, rather, compelled by fear - a fear of failing (asking all the "what if's") and perhaps fear of being overworked. One cannot force a person to undo this fear or expect better performance by pushing them to act differently, but rather addressing the root cause of the problem. Forcing or imposing on an individual to act differently, rather than fixing the root issue, just causes new issues. And that's what I am hearing from you here. Maybe employees have been worked very hard in the past and are over correcting for the past. Or, maybe, there are leaders (and it only takes one) who are condescending or set unrealistic expectations, e.g. calls an emloyee out by name when the employee screws up (etc toxic things). But leaders are there to shield those who they serve (employees), while holding those employees to account - and helping them scope and plan, etc. - and sharing accountability with them when things go wrong. Ps. I just want to make clear that the above para is meant generally (esp in large orgs), not at all a hunch about you or your leadership. I'd work with you any day. You are thoughtful, considerate, passionate and principled. The kinds of things I think anyone would want in a boss.
Bring back creative artists not afraid to make original games. Some developers just give games a magic feel. Tim is definitely one of them. I would trust him with my life.
Bring them back? What you're seeing isn't a lack of creative, fearless artists, it's a lack of creative freedom. The higher ups in the COMPANY refuse to take risks, therefore the creative artists that work for said company are restricted in what they can do. It's a soulless, machine-like corporate structure that rips the human element out of the equation and produces streamlined junk. I have a million innovative ideas for games but they'd never be considered if I were to work at one of these big companies. But it's a complicated situation, because it's hard to argue against caution when it comes to losing 100's of millions of dollars. Do you really want to risk failing when there are formulas already proven to work? It's easy to say "Just risk everything like you guys used to do" when you're not the one who has to pay the bill when everything comes crashing down. But I say that not to defend the corporate structure I just bashed a few sentences ago, I just think the issue is complicated and solutions are easier said than done. There definitely needs to be less bureaucracy and more creativity flowing if we want to see truly innovative AAA games. But that's just AAA, the indie scene is blowing up and is filled with a ton of innovation.
So well said and it applies to any corporate structure these days. The people at the very top have no idea how anything works and slow production down from the top to bottom. No one wants to take responsibility for anything because the goals of the company are so disconnected from reality. Fire people who don't want to take accountability, fire anyone that doesn't understand the process. Pretty simple, but once a company gets big enough it just becomes a web of bad direction and passing accountability.
Its not really size, it's whether the company is managed by the founder or not. The big game companies in 2000-2010 were still being run by the founders. After that they switched to professional managers. A good counterexample is Tesla, massive company, public, but still extremely efficient and actually capable when it comes to what it's trying to do.
This video made me realize what I've been doing wrong when learning to program, I was being too careful to write a good looking code. Thank you for this video Tim!
As a software developer of many years, I'd like to point out that there is some nuance to this. While you definitely want to be able to deliver something instead of endlessly iterate over the same piece of code, you also don't want to necessarily deliver something that "just works" in the least amount of possible time. There is a balance to be struck. You do want to try and make your code, uh, "good looking" as you put it. I'd rather call it readable, scalable and maintanable. However, going off of Tim's story, it's also important to understand what the goal is for the code you're writing - in his example it was supposed to be a quick poc to test other things out and not necessarily production ready code, so you might be ok spending way less time iterating than you normally would, as you are sure to come back to that funcitonality and improve it later.
@@TheSoiaIt isnt a hard concept. You write good code anytime you write real (permanent) code, but you don't reiterate over it more than once. You move on. It really is that simple: Write good code once then let it go.
I'm learning coding right now and honestly I'm pretty optimistic with my mindset being much older, take risks, either it works, or you can try again and know where it went wrong. I don't see being told to do something or figure out a problem as being talked down to or preyed upon. I know if I'm solving a problem, then I solve the problem, ask questions if I need to, and if I don't solve it right, then we can talk it out and we can learn something. I do think Indie studios are ahead of the curve by being more daring, and I think consumers need to be more forgiving when devs "Try" something, the current atmosphere of everything trying to be big ending up as "The blunder of the century" and a source of ridicule and stalking streamers and going "game bad" over and over in chat for 5 hours is, quite frankly, a mental illness and a mass psychosis event. It certainly adds very unnecessary stress. Before I started to learn coding, I always thought everything was very rigid "Only one way to solve any problem", but I've learned so much (And I've learned so little so far) but I've discovered just how much freedom there really is in it, and I feel like a lot of young people in the development space is in this cookie cutter "Follow the instructions on the homework exactly" mindset, as per the eternal student mindset, where you do what your professor wants and no more, trying to strike out on your own or being left with an assignment that isn't perfectly clear is mysterious and dangerous.
That's the best part of engineering, there are multiple ways to tackle a problem. Of course, later down the line you'll look at what you wrote and be kicking yourself at how badly designed it is, but that's apart from the point. if you get it working, who cares, you'll make better stuff later. The way I learned to code is for about a decade or so, I shut out the world and everybody's 'best coding practices this' and 'best coding practices that' etc..., and just made a few games, and one bigger one over the years. Later on, the best practices came to me as I just figured it out myself, and it was personally way funner that way, but it was more so "I want the computer to do this" and then looking up guide after guide online and forums and reading how to do things. The blank slate you can look at is insanely inspiring, you can make ANYTHING, literally anything happen in the virtual world. It's more addictive than the most addictive MMO.
@@astrahcat1212 This is almost exactly the comment I needed to know I wasn't just mistakenly presuming what I thought about it. Just trying and getting something out there to then change, or toss out as I make better, and I'll get better because I'll have experience as my teacher and I'll be sure to make lots of mistakes to learn from.
Thank you for getting that off your chest! I am a new gaming RUclipsr who is a magazine editor and designer IRL, and who once owned a local newspaper. Story two reminds me of my young reporters during that time. They always wanted more time to get things done than the elder crew and I knew was necessary-especially with investigative pieces-largely, I think, because of the risk involved. RUclips recommended your channel to me because I'm currently playing Fallout 3 on my channel, and I'm glad it did! Thanks for the insight. Thanks also for the videos about the original Fallout's development, and for making the game in the first place. I always put a small message of thanks to you in my video descriptions for Fallout. A commentary playthrough of the original is on my production calendar for next year, and I'm looking forward to revisiting it after 26 years. Have a great day!
I'm involved in dev stuff (not games) and developer estimates are insanely infuriating. I believe the quality of developers has gone down as the quantity of people in the field has increased. And the senior devs/tech leads/CTOs/etc are rarely incentivized to take sides against their own people. My best work has always come out of "squads" where a small, mixed team works directly. In those squads, one good developer is worth 10 cautious devs.
"If the amount of programmers doubles every N years, then at any time half of all programmers have less than N years of experience." And it doubled frequently over the past couple decades!
hehehe, those lazy devs should be greateful they have a chance working with you. They may have this delusion that the company is lucky to have them, but in fact it's the other way around. 40 hours work week? Away with that leftist nonesense.
@@an_imminence Well, that's because 'the barrier of entry is lower!' but that isn't the case if you specialize in a skill, for example GPU programming and architecture, C, C++, or hey assembly or something and take a year to learn the really difficult math and processes, or just in general the stuff that people are afraid to learn. The more difficult it's perceived to be, the less saturation there is in general.
To quote Office Space, "That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled." The only reward for working quickly and efficiently is more work. When you have to move job to job to get a decent raise, why be a try hard?
this isn't just a thing in the game development sphere, this is the same things that are happening in corporate enterprise development. Recently I was on a project that needed something done quickly, and for me it would take less than a day, but because they don't give me the job to implement it, they have to go to an offshore team of devs, they came back with an estimate measured in weeks. This is becoming more and more commonplace now. Estimates are getting padded out of control. I have no idea what these developers actually do all day, because it doesn't take as long as they say it does.
What do they do most of the day? They dont work. Capitalists exploit workers to the point of having slavery without the costs of slavery. So whenever wage slaves can, they fight back. Programmers are high skill jobs who work under people who have no clue about what programming is or how it's done. Essentially theyre magicians to these people. Since they are expensive to replace, the programmers can fight back against wage slavery by pretending to work 90% of the time. They probably literally play WoW, surf reddit/tiktok, and watch porn most of the work day. Theyre smart enough to hack and work aroubd any monitoring, if even monitored. All wage slaves do this to some extent if they can. White collar office jobs pushing paperwork is all about slacking off in the morning, doing a little work, then slacking off the remainder of the day - especially the last few hours before clocking out. Those who cant cheeze the system are considered to have brutal jobs where they are treated like animals. That's because they are. Everyone else cheezes their way to sanity and a more realistic work day of 2-4 hrs of actual work and the rest looking busy. Remember Minesweeper?
I think there was a very narrow window in the 90s to early 2000s for video games to become a truly great artform, but it was ultimately closed due to an emerging industry that wanted to 'perfect' the art for maximum enjoyment for a wide audience. But great art can't be 'perfected', it's made intuitively, not consciously, so 'game development caution' has created products instead.
![Jack Harlow - Hello Miss Johnson [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Q86_nlRoIGw/mqdefault.jpg)
You haven't lived in the modern corporate world until you've had a meeting about a meeting
Expect this to get alot worse over time as more of these incompetents are all you have to hire from 😬☹
Problem is small companies adopt the corporate style of doing business. I worked in team of 7 people and we had legit 2 meetings a week only about productivity.
"Ways of Working!"
I work in supply chain and we do this also. I think it’s everywhere now. Analytics and technology has made the world micromanage everything.
Lol, that is trite. At the beginning of projects we have meetings about the meetings about the meeting. It gets meta fast.
Game development is full of people collecting paychecks and not people who are passionate about games, story, or fun.
I really think that there is some kind of feminist, woke, green haired, overweight, middle aged woman in the development team that somehow manages to suck the soul out of the new games.
@@Frank941 It's what happens when beign smart and competent isn't the only thing you're hired for.
@@Frank941 We could go back to the stone age and you would still be a miserable loser.
It's more complicated, imagine if you are tactical rpg fan and work in the game industry and the only good paying projects available are those mobile online team FPS thingies. Of course, you need the money and your heart aren't in that. And this doesn't have anything wrong with that, it happens in any profession.
@@Frank941is this feminist, green haired, overweight middle aged woman in the room with us?
A friend of mine is a film journalist. A few weeks ago he said casually that he waits to see what the general hype and consensus is around a film before he writes the review. I said "Do you need to watch the film for that? And furthermore that isn't much of a review" he explained that nobody would read his review if it didn't echo the consensus. I was rocked to my core and left the conversation with no respect for his vocation at all. It is the same everywhere is what I've seen since, nobody has their own opinion anymore and they don't even realise it. They literally wait to see what their opinion should be based on what others think EVEN if they are a professional opinion maker.
It's really sad but the problem is also the consumers of these reviews. If they see anything that goes against the popular opinion, they rip the reviewer apart. Case and point look for any RUclips video essay that says something like "maybe fallout New Vegas isn't the most bestest game ever made" and look at the dislikes and the amount of death threat in the comments
"nobody would read his review if it didn't echo the consensus"
Strange since a bunch of channels on youtube popped up doingthe complete opposite of film mainstream film reviews.
We used to get validation from the people around us. Now we get it from masses of strangers clicking "like" online. Independent thought can't be sustained in that environment.
@@WayStedYouAnd then audience capture happens, and most of those channels can't afford to go against their audience and "counterculture" narrative.
It's called conformity, a favourite of the left ideology, which now has infected the totality of western culture!
Yep. I think Starfield is a perfect example of what an enormous budget and a paralyzing amount of caution gets you. Bethesda took zero risks, and the game is bland as hell.
bold to call a loading screen simulator with guns a game..
@satakrionkryptomortis people call those tiger electronic handhelds games too 🤷♂️ both still kinda suck tho
Skyrim also took zero risks and was a massive success
Money. Of course, risk means the potential to lose money.
But it's about money. Bethesda could have (and they could have at any time in the past) really created a new Creation Engine, *really* overhaul it. They didn't, because this costs time and (thus) money.
Skyrim gets some of the most whitewashing of any game ever - on launch it was absolutely horrible with 10+ load screens constantly through the game. Yeah it is a cool open world with a ton of content but people give a lot of passes for the things that are not cool.
Act Man included a clip from this video in a video of his, so I came to check out the full thing. I was not disappointed. You are very well-spoken and incredibly knowledgeable. Great video!
same
Concurred!
Yeah that's why I'm here
act who? which video
same
I think this is why we see such stellar indie games - they aren't design by committee, and profits aren't the primary driving force.
Precisely, they lack any professional MBA-havers.
Yes, but there's also plenty of indie games that just fail. You never see them because they suck.
It's better for players to not design by committee, because as players we'd rather have 3 great games and 7 awful games, than 10 meh games. But I can see suits wanting to make a predictable profit. And plenty of players do buy those by-the-numbers games, so clearly there's a market for them. And I don't think you can really argue that Ubisoft tricks its players into buying yet another Ubisoft game -- people know what they're getting into, and yet many people apparently like a predictable by-the-numbers game.
Dude, he isn't talking about money. He is talking about how the industry are a bunch of lil bitches.
Indie games are still low budget and effort compared to company budget. Unreal engine makes the games itself. Nobody wants to program or fine tune anymore. They want the presets with no effort. Indie games do nothing new but copy and pasted old ideas to make money off of old fans. Souls-born games for example. Indies exists to make money off of old legacies and ideas. Pixel Art is absolute bloat to the indie industry. Woke workers and gamers are the problem as well.
@@lightworker2956 Just like there are RUclipsrs that fail, artists that fail, musicians that fail, startup companies of any type that fail...
Like you said, we'd rather have 3 great games and 7 awful games. And that is exactly how that happens, through indie devs.
The thing about "by-the-numbers" games isn't that there's a market for them, it's that people give devs the benefit of the doubt to make a better game than last time, to have improved and taken into account criticism that has been shared quite clearly on the internet.
And often times they make games with ideas and concepts that are amazing and that hold so much potential so people want those games to be good sooooo badly, but then get disappointed after having played it.
So, it's not that there's a markets for those meh-games, but rather people want those AAA games to be good, and are willing to spend money to try and see for themselves.
This isn't just game development, I think across tech industries this is happening. People are just more risk averse, its likely because society at large is more anxiety ridden than before, and companies are bigger and bigger like you mentioned.
It's not a problem with an anxious society. It's a problem with corporate demands. They want everything to be super duper absolutely perfectly profitable and infinitely profitable. This insanely unfair demand basically leads to a toxic environment that terrifies workers at every level.
@@natsume-hime2473 I think you might be one of the anxiety ridden. If the incentive is to make things profitable, people wouldn't feel comfortable wasting time and being cautious. It's actually really common to throw caution to the wind for the sake of profit.
I think people are just avoiding negative attention for their mistakes. As industries mature, people are more concerned about the opinions of others than the results they get because their colleagues have developed strong opinions about how things should be done. But I'm just guessing.
@@brandonkellner4053 While there's some truth to what you say, that's not the biggest problem. The mass of people taking over running games companies, who are not from the games industry is actually a huge problem. Especially when they do things like exclusively promote yes men, take massive bonuses, and then lay off entire teams of dedicated developers. The end result is that and the drive for profits incentivizes ass kissing, over actually getting work done. Since if you don't kiss ass, you wind up fired for cause with a bad review from your former employer. Which can utterly ruin one's career.
Yeah, it's across US society. Pussification is the non-PC term. A term that proves itself, because that term will make the pussified uncomfortable and/or worry that it makes other people uncomfortable.
it's definitely driven by corporate leadership.
I've seen teams where The Boss would reject people's unsolicited ideas and prototype features so often that everyone just either stopped trying to contribute ideas or would look for approval at every turn in order to shield themselves from the frustration of wasted enthusiasm.
Oh totally that happened to me in one job I had. All that “brainstorming” was was the boss rejecting people’s ideas and then making everyone clap for the boss’s idea.
True bro, people are afraid to lose their job if your boss is egoistic and cant take any ideas from the others. You will hear those good ideas in the smoking area 😂
I have been on brainstorming groups put together to think of solutions for what ever concerns the current admin has at the time. We would spend hours coming up with ideas, identifying problem areas, thinking of possible solutions and writing a formal report only to have everything we come up with dismissed in favor for what ever the admin had already planned. What many of us realized over time was those committees' purpose was never to come up with solutions, they existed to give legitimacy to decisions that had already been made and provide cover by sharing fault if something didn't work. Obviously this is a example of bad management and work environment, but employees can experience this a few times and it get to the point where they stop participating mentally. If they then work at a place that has a healthy environment they first have to overcome that impulse of not caring.
Yeah, unfortunately many bosses want yes-men. Which makes it the correct career move to be a yes-man yourself.
Even if you don't have such a boss: if you volunteer an idea and it's stupid, you look stupid. If you volunteer an idea and it's great, it's not like there's a huge upside for you. It's not like you're getting a 10k bonus or something.
i'd say the company should help them overcome that unhealty impules they developed, and then keep nourish that passion they were able to take back, if multiple ppl witht hat mentality, creativity, passion and will work together to achieve the same common goal i'd say it becomes very unlikely for it to not be achieved or even surpassed in its expectations/initial plans.@@Valecan
This resonates so much for me. I changed jobs from an indie studio to a "AAA" one and now, a lot of things that I would just try before, now feel almost impossible.
I'll have to talk an convince so many people to try something, that I'm starting my own indie studio.
It's for those reasons that I'm kinda scared what kind of work environment I'm gonna get in game dev when I get out of college.
@@coltonkearschner9593 Dont be a chump. Make sure if you work, that you own the fruits of your own labor.
@cartergabriel5949 for sure man. I will do my best and continue to develop my skills.
I get you, there are a lot of different work environments, and you will learn from all of them. Just be sure to prioritize your well-being before everything. Specially when you're young, you can quit and move to other companies. Also I'll stay open to Indie and AAA, to learn from everything. Just my 2 cents! @@coltonkearschner9593
The core idea and interactive gameplay are at the core of the game.
AAA games are very cautious to take risks in altering the gaming experience (why fix it if it ain’t broken?). This is the reason 3A games get stale with each release.
In an indie studio you can take risks, because the creators had a vision for it. They’ll want to take it all the way.
However, after the core is done 3A studios have a lot more people to polish it into a shining turd, or diamond. Indie studios don’t get that luxury, it’s either about finding the right VFX / materials / modeler etc consultant, or go alone and “git good” at EVERY ASPECT OF VIDEO GAME MAKING.
To sum it up: with any game, you either have a hit in the interactive gameplay (even if it sucks in the pro polish layer vfx animations motion tracking etc) which is programming or visual scripting. Or you don’t! You can polish the core to look good, but if the core is rotten good luck 🍀!!
All the best mates!! Never say never !
That is when you should give up 🆙 n your dream of making games NEVER 🎉
I've worked as QA at AAA studios for 9 years and everything you said hits the nail on the head
why are quality assurance the first to let go in companies? what specifically do you guys do ?
@@shaggytoph as the game gets bigger, more variables to test, QA expands to meet the scope and timelines. When the game is shipped what do you do with maybe 100+ testers with nothing to test until the next game is far enough along. Ideally the studio or publisher has a pipeline where people can roll onto the next project but doesn't always work out that way. My recommendation for a career in QA is to expand your knowledge, always learn new areas, improve your tech skills and understanding and be able to pivot into different industries when needed. Games are a great area to get your skills up because they have so much to them so you can learn many domains but it's a tough place to maintain a career long term - pay and job security is much lower than other industries doing similar work.
@@shaggytoph they assure quality.
not to say, they're there to tell the teams "I'd not ship it in that stage, I'd think about it again", just for the product to be shipped regardless and to be named in the credits for testing in the worst case - so essentially eating a ton of hate as loads of people somehow blame QA for "saying its fine" when often enough they may even get fully ignored.
@@Unknown_Genius Someone once said that you can't assure quality. Because you can't measure quality. YOu can measure quantity, though. So perhaps that's why we end up with games that have: "Over 1000 Planets!", "Over a Million Lines Of Dialogue!", "100 hours of main story!!", "150 Ammo types", "16 times the detail!!". As if any of that could ever mean the game is good.
You can only assure quantity, not quality.
@@OrangeNash you can assure quality, what you mean is that you can't advertize it unlike quantity, that's a good point tho "1000 planets" is way better marketing than "Trust us that the quality is good altho we don't have 1000 planets".
This doesn't exist only in Game Development. Progamming in all enterprise sectors has gotten like this, the last years.
My personal opinion is that bad management is mostly to blame for that. As devs are being blamed for missing deadlines and/or other work related issues, the defence (caution) increases proportionally. Even if you yourself aren't a bad manager, past experiences and/or stories build this up. [Spiros/Reckless]
Even as someone who manages other people I see people on my team not taking risks I would’ve taken before being raised to management. Management can’t take all the blame on this one
True.
Im sure this can be unlearned by a new league of managers just firing you if you cant do a 45 min task your boss asks you to do until 4 weeks.
Risk taking is a cultural issue. Management sets the culture. If you want people to take risks, you have to make sure they know you're not going to rip them to shreds if they fuck up.
@@Deliriumend this guy in his work environment was way more lenient than he needed to be. His programmers threatened to leave over a whiteboard. He gave them 2 weeks on code that would take 45 mins. If it's a societal problem. Maybe our programmers are learning in college to put in minimal effort and glide through their salary.
What we've been seeing is people who have never played a video game in their lives buying into game companies and dictating what they do. They pump money into dead on arrival projects that may or may not ever be completed and when they realise they have no market for these projects, a whole chain of layoffs and closures ripple through the entire company and its subsidiaries. As a developer you can do everything right and make great games, but if you're owned by people who have no idea what they're doing then all of a sudden your next project could be your last.
We are also seeing a lot more people playing games who weren't playing in the 1990's and 2000's. People who like their games to be more cinematic and less challenging. I call them "run to next cut scene" games. Ubisoft, basically, but there's loads more. Even Bethesda are strongly influenced by it now. Less challenging RPG mechanics, just "follow quest marker. get reward".
Thankfully, there are still many actual games, such as Factorio, Satisfactory, Slay the Spire, Don't Starve, Crusader Kings, Civilisation etc etc It's just that too many , video games seem to begin and end with "interactive movie" and they are the games that are often the worst produced right now. Though that's subjective - this new generation of gamer laps them up by the million of course!
I think big teams or things that are incredibly structured/process driven run into this. Team gets big, no longer have the average level of expertise or trust you used to, things get turned into soulless process docs. You get a task, think it will take you 1 work day, but realize if you run into something unexpected it may take a week. If you put 1 day on a estimate, and you miss, you affect your performance review. If you put 1 week, do it in a day, your metrics look great!
Bad KPIs/incentives screw stuff up. Small teams where you can trust people to just do a thing are so much more productive on a per worker basis.
Scaling up properly is one of the hardest things to do.
I was very lucky to have a game dev professor at UCSC who warned all his students that this is the life of working for a triple A game dev studio. Avoided the industry like the plague despite majoring in game design, turned out to be an amazing hobby and now I work for a mid sized software company and have so much more freedom than I ever would have imagined
Seems to me the video game industry is in need of a revolution. We still need games to be made and amazing ones at that.
I dont know a lot of dev studios but I would only consider working for DE and specifically on warframe.
I dont know a lot of dev studios but I would only consider working for DE and specifically on warframe.
What is ucsc?
Yeah, that's also my story exactly. If I love doing something, why would I let a corporation destroy that for me? It's like making yourself financially dependent on producing music, just because you love doing it - not always the best idea, if you have other options.
I've seen similar caution in completely non-gaming adjacent industries as well that started springing up around 2010 and it used to drive me mad. It's a skill in itself to learn to navigate with and around this while not getting bitter or taking it out on juniors as this is all they know. Great insight as usual.
Oustanding video and perspective, Tim. I retired from the USAF last year. My mentors taught me the same principles you described here, only in the fighter aircraft generation field. Over the years I took part in many aggreesive debates concerning management of a fleet of aircraft or warfighting. These debates were always full of passion, but never personal. We were all trying to get to a better place even though many disagreements were encountered. The key was they were never personal.
My main lesson for the new generation is to develop your emotional intelligence. Strive to be even keeled, avoid the temptations of apathy and misplaced anger. Life is good and work is rewarding if you allow it to be.
I'd work with or for you anytime on anything because the accountable environment you seem to create is one I love and where I thrive.
Hey Tim, I work in the non-game segment of software development. We see expanding time estimates as well and I think it's a push back against being measured. People pad because it's really hard to shut someone down after you've agreed to an estimate, and they go on to change the scope. We've all had our share of one line Jira tickets that that have ballooned in complexity as new requirements have been "discovered".
This same thought process feeds into all other industries too. As a freelancer the battle of ensuring you don't sell yourself short when estimating a project can make or break you 😂 as you say it can be difficult to account for the entire process accurately hence the padding of time 😅
😊
I second this. Not software development but mechanical engineering here. Especially in the early stages of design some parameters have been identified but more come to the surface as development progresses. Yet in a professional environment we like to assign time constraints as cost and lead time is something a customer is mostly concerned about. It can be a difficult process to keep a project contained in the early stages to ensure the solution that is being developed is worth pursuing.
the biggest problem is that a lot of us has been burnt by this same process. you can in meeting give optimist best case scenario estimate and insist that they are just that only for the counterpart to come at you later mad treating said estimate as a legally binding agreement under the worst possible conditions. they just remember the number you spewed not the context of it.
I think it come down to knowing who you're interacting with, their background, level of technical awareness and their personality, which is harder in bigger companies.
another thing that I noticed that produce this kind of frustration is 'leaky information middle men(s)', say a manager or product owner or other related roles who doesn't know which questions are worth asking, what's worth remembering and communicating and whats worth filtering. a lot of the time you'll find yourself saying that said project would be a lot faster it and better quality if you didn't have to go through them and just ask directly.
I regularly double or tripple estimates just to be on the save side :D
@@ive3336 yeah. which is why I thought you where supposed to always give your self more time than what you think you would need. But it seems like everyone in both of these comment sections want to do away with that advice. which seems dumb to me.
AAA gaming is dead and passionless - confirmed.
This video was discussed in r/gamedev reddit as well and they didn't take this friendly at all. Their takes and ideas were poor communications, toxic work culture, skipping queues, unmaintainable code injection etc.
my biggest takeaway after this is just that i need to keep pushing with my own game projects, honestly. thought inducing, but also weirdly inspirational. thank you for the video about your insights, we're all forever in debt for your contributions to the game world ❤
Well said :)
Agreed.
I definitely noticed this while being at a game development school. There was a constant push for meetings to talk about every little thing and using soft gloves for handling development problems. I recall one meeting in particular where my group had to pick a reference game and despite having talked about the topic for several days, the meeting still lasted for several hours with zero movement happening, yet we still had a bunch of notes that needed to be written. When I saw how bad the mood got I just decided that enough was enough and took over as the typewriter. We finished the meeting in less than half an hour after that.
There is very little risk taking nowadays that is driven by passion. I'd like to see more of that too.
You reminded me of something my father told me about management. He said "sometimes when you are in a leadership position it is more important that you make a decision than to make the "right" decision". His point being that you can't let mulling over a decision paralyze the team into inaction. This becomes even more important when time is a resource that you can run out of.
Reminds me of when I worked on a team project a few months ago in college for Game Design... I took on the role of team lead because nobody else wanted to. I hated it. They wanted to have at least one meeting a day to talk about our project and with 2 people not pulling their own weight or asking questions to clarify things, we almost didn't pass. I tried so hard to get people to speak up and share their thoughts and ideas, but they wouldn't. I had to reach out to our professor several times to step in because I didn't want to fail the class. But yeah, nobody wants to take risks, even when those risks are so small. It's like trying to get a child to eat vegetables, but these are adults. I don't get it.
@@Valecan I remember this from Band of Brothers, where a commanding officer got everyone killed not by making the wrong decision, but by making no decision - which was always worse than even the wrong decision
@@Araphex I was part of a group project in college, with 3 others. I dont rememver the 3rd bc they were so silent. The other two were young girls (kids, basically) while I was a fully grown adult. We decided collectively to meet after class every day, to work on the group project. The first two meetings were useless, got nowhere, and both girls just wanted to gossip and discuss girl talk. So I'd leave whenever they would start that, as I asked if were done.
Then they assigned parts to the project. Then they said they were having a friday meeting at a fast food restaurant jn the evening. I told them I wasnt coming bc that was late notice and we already agreed to meet after class. The evening didnt work bc I was an adult with adult responsibilities like a Job in the evening. I already explaines that, when we agreed only to meet immediately after class when I had a free hour before my next course. They just got angry and accused me of being lazy and not caring about the project. They said something juvenile about how I essentially wasnt passionate about the project bc I would leave early every meeting (I didnt stay to listen to them talk about boys after they did so for 20 minutes each time and then said it's fine if I leave since we were done). I said I already did my written part we agreed on and submitted it to them already. They later said it was not correct bc they changed directions at the fast food meeting. I told them I was an adult and sent the professor an email. They threatened back they will also talk to him about me being a problem.
The ironic part is the leader who was so nasty, didnt do any writing. They agreed with themselves that they would both do the presentation portion together, half and half, so me and the other did all the actual writing. Convenient laziness.
Needless to say, the Professor was a 50 year old adult. Not an 18 to 20-something year old childish little girl. I just emailed him saying they, like teenagers, just walked to talk about guys they were dating, but I did my part. I explained the situation and their threats, in case they wanted to lie. Professor laughed at the situation and told me he understands, and to turn in what I had and do a presentation on it alone. Easiest A I ever made. No clue what they said, but I suspect he didnt favor the gossipping children who almost certainly lied to him. All I know is she was especially pissed bc the professor said she had to rewrite my portion (or else it's plagiarism) bc she told me she wasnt allowed to use my work and got angry she had to rewrite it bc I was such a dramatic problem. Hilarious!
A lot of people dont want to pull their own weight or are so juvenile they act like children when you just want to put in your dues.
@@nowayjosedaniel that was a pleasant read, glad that justice was served that time.
these videos have become part of my daily routine, I've never worked in the industry but your stories are so interesting
The term I've heard using for that is "analysis paralysis". I've worked on projects where the "analysis" portion took way too long and prototyping was seen as a part of development, not a part of proof.
What usually adds to that is people that think "good criticism" is "finding reasons not to do something". People who desperately cling to "holes" they found in a design feature as reasons to prolong the analysis, not understanding that sometimes things have pros and cons - and its the game design pillars that tell you the pros are worth the cons.
it feels to me like a lot of people today are motivated by thinking they or their work has to be perfect. like there's a lot of pressure on people, and kids...
Well, I would say that "analysis paralysis" is not about this case. Here a manager comes up with an idea, explains it (it doesn't look like there was any discussion or analysis), and asks a random dev over their TL's head to implement it in the next several hours. I think paralysis is coming not from the dev in this case.
@@Erilis000”Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”
We live in a fear driven society. A house with fear cannot live side by side with love (passion/creativity/true connections with others). Fear always keeps us chained. We believe things will get better, but it won’t when fear is the foundation for whatever you do in life. Fear lives on a fictional story. A story that has no ending. A story of selfishness and greed. So let’s try to stop this society of fear. Start with small things in your life.❤
Terrific stuff!
Started gaming at around 1993-4, and for many years I truly felt like game developers actually talking to me via the game. I felt like they are my older friends, and the games were made for me.
With so much years of gaming, I - like many "old time" gamers, so experienced in games, that I can often tell my kids where and when things in their game will happen BEFORE they get there. I know games, I feel games, and I can read how the game was done.
And what I see in most of today's big games - is sad, worrisome and sometimes disgusting.
Maybe once or twice I considered a thought that its just me - you know, the usual "nah, its just you getting older, grumpier and just stupider. Its only nostalgia talking" -- all that stuff. But no - I know myself, and I trust in my common sense enough to see that its AAA companies and journo-suckups that are problematic, not my view.
And to see it pretty much confirmed by industry's legend - is truly a blessing. Timothy, DesignerDave - and I believe others will appear soon. Thank you for great games of our youth, and thank you for being honest!
Incredible. Being an amateur developer with only a couple of hobby projects that has nothing to do with gaming, i started how to do the code for the combat AI in the time you were explaining it. Can't believe 4 weeks would ever be the timeline for that!
Your stories about yelling with Leonard remind me of Richard Feynman. He talks a lot about not being intimidated by other physicists-he was like 24 when he started working at Los Alamos, and he would happily jump into any conversation happening around him and was fearless about calling an idea stupid or impractical. Apparently Niels Bohr took note and noticed that Feynman was the only one who would push back on his ideas, and started specifically asking for him to be included in discussions. He wasn't causing drama-he was getting stuff done. Sounds like those meetings (and yours) were lots of fun.
You also make an excellent point about journalism. Reviews are not nearly as good now. They tend to focus on the same elements, they criticize things I generally don't care about (frametrates), and they give lower scores to games that fail a benchmark, regardless of whether the game is any good or not. Exoprimal got savaged in reviews, and it's one of the best games I've played this year. Not sure what the answer is here, but I hope journalism finds a way out of that, because I think the long-term feedback loop of that will result in games that are bland and much less fun (but can hit 120fps at 4k, wooo).
This creates more opportunities for indies. If it takes the AAA people 4 weeks to do an hours work, then even their massive army of workers may not be able to complete with a solid, well rounded, indie developer.
But AAA still have the lion's share of the market, due to the fact they have the marketing power and ability to manipulate the hype machine. Look at Starfield, arguably Bethesda's weakest game so far, absolutely reeking of the 'development caution' problems discussed in this vid. But they a) are Bethesda and fanboys will always buy their product no matter what, b) they're owned by Microsoft, who can spend $millions in marketing and expertly generating hype.
@@paulw5039 at least starfield exposes who is a shill and who isnt, that game is just bad, everything wrong with fallout 4 but on steroids
@@cloudcity4194 say whatever you want, the game is objectively bad, no amount of liking it can change that, unless you like bad games, then its great
@@cloudcity4194 Found the Shill
@@DanT-dh8lzok, it has exposed all this... now what? this exact thing has happened a million times before and nothing has changed lmao
As a director of software development, I wholeheartedly agree with you on the points regarding padded estimates and a lack of accountability. It is applicable to ALL of software development, not just video games. Engineers are incredibly well compensated because their jobs are not easy. However, somewhere along the way, the industry developed a sense of entitlement. There is this sentiment held by the majority of engineers that they are only obligated to work at 50% capacity, while being compensated at 200% the base salary of most workers with a college degree.
To be clear, this doesn't apply to all developers. That said, it has become a cultural norm. The more established your company, the more prevalent this attitude becomes. This video helped remind me that I'm not crazy. If you quote 2 weeks for something that I could write in a day, there is a problem.
Not sure, but I've been in gaming and this feels a bit biased. I get Tim’s points, but let’s talk about the other side too.
1) If a team is using Jira for tasks and bugs, adding a whiteboard will cause fragmentation. They already prioritize in Jira, so a whiteboard just splits focus. Having a top 10 list that producers check and assign to their teams seems more logical. Instead of you the director chasing each dev down, which is wierd in large teams where you don’t know every dev personally. The producers come in and help bridge the gap between directors and devs. In smaler teams where you know each dev, it's easier to talk to each one personally. But with the director role, and large teams, people are going to look at you differently. Did you know the programmers on a more personal level?
2) Some code may be quick to write, but fitting it into existing systems takes time. I'm guessing the team was using UE4 and had their workflow and pre built systems in place. Adding unit tests, QA, etc., it all adds up. So, you might have gotten your quick fix, but it seems like you might be a bit tough to work with, and thus not hearing about the ripple effects of the change.
3) Passionate meetings. Nah, I got nothing here. Fully agree with Tim here!😂
I miss the spirit of the era of gaming around 2000. There were a lot of interesting ideas from big developers - Sacrifice, Typing of the Dead, Majesty. I'm not sure we'll ever see a AAA game with that kind of experimentation again anytime soon. I guess maybe tastes have changed, but I think the caution you're talking about here is also a good explanation.
shitty games from a shitty time, you should really think about getting replacement contact lenses they seem to be rose-tinted just a smidge.
Unfortunately there's a lot fewer new ideas to do. Since around 2000 it was already hard to come up with a unique new concepts for games. 20years later and it's even harder. It's hard when you pitch what you think is a new idea, and it gets shot down with "[insert game] did that already."
@@renaigh People like you are as bad as people who complain that modern games suck compared to older games. There was plenty of trash to go around in every generation of gaming. If you think Typing of the Dead was "shitty" there's something wrong with your sense of fun. My typing speed is still really fast, because of that game. Since it was a good typing tutor that was addictively fun and hilarious in nature at the same time.
@natsume-hime2473 originality is over rated imo. There hasn't been an original story since Gilgamesh, and even that's probably based on pre-existing oral storytelling. Just give me believable characters and a well told story and I'm happy. (This is coming from a writing perspective, not game dev)
Thanks for the reminder on Sacrifice. I have fond memories of muddling my adolescent self through that game and getting turbo stuck on the final level. I’d kill for a spiritual successor.
Frankly I think software development projects have simply bloated to a point where this kind of thing is inevitable. Small teams could make amazing games even in technical sense back in the 90's and early 00's. It would be neat to see if people could accept less demanding assets, if it meant that games could come out with features in and bugs out within 2 years.
Players will absolutely accept less graphical assets. Look how hard battlebit is popping off. Most devs don't seem to have the ingenuity required to develop polished game mechanics that are required to succeed without graphics carrying incompetency.
To an extent yes, but keep in mind that you're probably comparing average games of today to the best games from the 90's / early 00's. After all, you're not even remembering an average game from 30 years ago, because why would you?
If you compare the best games from the 90's to the best games of today, you might say "well Baldur's Gate 3 is an amazing game, we're not doing so bad."
I remember taking a look into the development cycles of some of my favourite games as a kid and being blown away compared to games today. For example, the original Ratchet and Clank went from pre-production to release in 20 months with a team of 40. Ratchet and Clank 2 had a 10 month development cycle where the team grew to 80 people.
You mean Rimworld?
@@hawtlava Dark Age of Camelot was created on a 4mil budget by 30 peoppe in 18 months, and it was a massive 3 realm 40 class MMO with PvE, PvP Battlegrounds, and epic innovative RvRvR on a massive world map.
I think you brilliantly articulated the problem of modern games: there's just no soul. I can go back and play many games from the 90s/00's where you can feel the passion from the development teams oozing directly into the experience.
Go play indie games then
This is just stupid.
@@SiborgGamersome are great, and many just use recycled assets from an engine’s digital store page. And it’s crazy because some of these are praised. Look at Tunic. Total rip-off in many ways from different games and gets tons of praise. So then the next indie dev will do the same thing
@@pt8292 lmao what? what's wrong with Tunic? why dismiss it as "a total rip-off" from other games? are Hollow knight or Blasphemous rip-offs too? how about something like Songs of Conquest? is that just a rip-off of Heros of Might and magic?
@@SiborgGamerjust gotta find the right ones.
I can relate to Tim's stories. The most egregious example I have is when I asked our lead programmer for a simple straight line to be drawn between nodes when we were working on a map. He game back with an estimate of three weeks. Three weeks, just to get our engine to render straight lines! Thing is, I learned that this wasn't just caution, it actually WOULD take a considerable amount of time to get that feature into production, because it would have to be merged up into the engine branch and then the engine changed would be pulled back down into our project. And there was a different team working exclusively on the engine. I think a big part of why we're seeing these inflated estimates is not just caution, it's that it ACTUALLY takes long to do them due to needlessly complicated team and project structures. Yes, you need rigid & complex structures in AAA studios with hundreds (or thousands) working on a single game, but when you're a small studio with a project team of under 10 people, copying these structures (because you want to be professional after all!) does more harm than good.
This was my thought. Maybe the simple AI request itself wouldn't be much of a challenge, but with many other changes being worked on simultaneously, it adds a new whole set of logistical issues. If someone else is working on new AI moves, maybe the new AI breaks it, etc.
Fallout 1 was made by 15 people, Outer Worlds by 80. If you want game development to be as fluid as before, maybe trim your staff.
However, the lead programmer should be able to explain they why it would take 2 weeks...
@@fiskern2241I think that comes down to either one of two things: 1. He’s padding the time so he doesn’t have to do much work and is being called out on it so he can’t come up with a reason.
2. Younger people these days do not know how to communicate their needs and stick up for themselves therefore can’t explain why X can’t get done because of Y.
@@maxpain45678 You forgot
3. They actually do take 3 weeks for a 3 hour task because they are incompetent and dont actually know how to program. FizzBuzz is real.
they're pre-optimizing their work flow lol
What really gets me us how poor the lead programmer was at communicating on behalf on his subordinates to his manager.
Beyond lacking communication skills, he was downright rude and antagonistic it appears ... at least as the story is remembered. But having had similar issues with managers in thr past, you tend to hold onto such things.
Dude I wanna reach through the screen and give you a big hug. Feeling this so strongly these days and I would even add that caution goes to publishing and investment/acquisition. Fabulous video and it seriously made my week to hear a great industry steward spouting truth.
It is such a breath of fresh air to hear a competent, intelligent expert in the field talk about the problems of the industry.
Everyone else is so scared or weak to be honest, that they pretend everything is great and every peer is a perfect, competent genius. I am so tired of the fake civility and the pretending the house being on fire means everything is fine.
I think as players we've always had a suspicion that game dev culture has changed over the years but that little anecdote about how passion over your work is perceived as threatening is really elucidating.
Like because your working in a cubicle, caring about your work in that way isn't allowed, both in terms of the work environment (Which presumably became much more proffesional over the years),and the games themselves.
It's probably a reflection of the "industry" in games industry being calcified. And in that sense it would be a bit odd to be getting excited over data management or some equivalent because the stakes are percieved to be so low.
The story of you arguing with other devs, not because of anger but from the shear passion of wanting to make the game better, reminds me of the final panel interview to my first job in games, some years back. The lead dev and CTO got into a heated argument about how to properly implement a serializer. I was soooo tickled by that. I was laughing so hard my eyes started to water. They apparently found my reaction to the situation very endearing, because the next business day (interview was on Friday followed by a holiday weekend). I had a job offer from them in my email. 😂
Part of the reason why I left my last job in games (not the one I spoke of above, but another) was because of how massively siloed design and engineering was. I felt my creativity so deeply constricted. Despite the fact that the team was relatively small and started off as an indie. Most of the decisions were being pushed by Niantic. Bit by bit Niantic began to chisel our game into essentially another PoGo game with a Transformers wrapper.
For the last few years I have been building my own game and is my hope to turn this venture into a proper team/studio one day. Nothing comes close to that level of freedom. Building games to me is truly an art, a means by which devs can express themselves. If you can't express yourself in your work, there is no point.
The stories are so fascinating please give us more. It's extremely rare that we get a look into the workplace dynamics of tech/creative industries for large projects like yours.
i long for the day i see a former Rockstar dev talk about game development there. haven't found anything. I did just watch former BGS devs talk about their work on Skyrim. Look up Skyrim Documentary Finally Awake
I would also love him to invite developers he shitted all over and let them say something. Just from his speech, I found way too many red flags. I have a feeling that HE was the main issue there.
Heck nowadays the stories that come out of this AAA game studios are even more entertaining than most of the bland and unfinished games XD!!!!
This line: 7:17 'games have gone from being an expression of an idea like artwork from a particular person or group of people into a corporate driven money-seeking instrument'. That line is fundamental. Great channel. I have gotten more into gave development recently, this really helps me
The 2nd story he told is ridiculous. I'm a high school dropout who taught himself to program on his own time, no job in the industry, a passing hobby. The code he wants; takes 2 minutes to write in psuedo, maybe 10-30 minutes to plug it into the actual code base with the actual parameters.
if (name not in aggro_list) {
aggro_list.add(name)
self .health -= name.damage
} else {
self .health -= name.damage
}
Keep in mind, I don't know what the actual names are, because it's a hypothetical, so the actual variables would be different, but this is essentially the code that he wanted added. It took 2 minutes to write...SERIOUSLY. To add insult to injury, I'm a dropout whose best job was delivering pizza. If the programmers on team can't do this, they need to be fired.
The above code I'd put in it's own object, that way I can inherit the system into each enemy, and adjust the system by itself without getting spaghetti code.
(I added a space to self .health because it will load a website link otherwise.)
I work in an engineer for a large complicated system involving hardware and software development. You have hit the nail on the head, i think these are really astute observations that apply to any sort of development/engineering environment
You work IN an engineer, How's that? Sounds fun
The biggest lesson I’ve gleaned from this, is that I should focus on hiring hungry, new devs instead of experienced ones, because those experienced ones are going to abjectly waste my time and money on a work ethic that was shaped by a corporation
I've been a designer myself for the past 6 years, in the industry for nearly 10. Unfortunately what you describe is all I know, and it's hard to stay invested in what I'm doing when I see this kind of mentality surrounding me. I've just moved to a small indie studio of only 3 people (excluding myself) so I'm hoping it will be more like the game development of old, where I get to experience what you and our game dev ancestors had. I want heated discussions because in my experience that's how the product flourishes. Not a cold, passive aggressive teams meeting where everyone hold their cards to their chest. Thanks for this video Timothy, it has affirmed some thoughts I've been having and helped me to understand that it doesn't need to be this way.
This perfectly articulates what I think is a problem with a lot entertainment. There's this need to have a 'rule-set' for everything, there are stats and data that lead to predictable outcomes, everything has been studied and has a distinct process, which in turn has lead to so many games and movies made on insane budgets religiously following 'predictable-outcomes' leading to being generic. Everyone's following the rules to the letter, without, as you say risking an idea they're not sure on how it will perform.
But this is only on the top, because yes the indie space is where the true expression and art of video games can be explored. Seriously so many awesome games now.
This speaks to me of my days at IBM.
I'm a very experienced Java developer, and when I joined, I was asked to provide coding time estimates. I gave what I thought were reasonable estimates for simple stuff, and I immediately got into huge trouble with management.
It turned out (and it took me too long to realise this) that whoever asked for the estimate actually had not idea how software development worked, yet their job title indicated that they knew what they were doing. But they certainly did not! They only wanted massively padded estimates. Ridiculously padded. That was just the "IBM" way of doing things!
I'm surprised I lasted 2 years there. The only way to get anything started, even simple things, was to somehow figure out what your manager wanted and then tell them exactly what they wanted to hear. And if anything did get done ... it took almost forever to actually do it!
I work in IT and this happens there too. In my industry it's because management is increasingly threatening people's jobs for making decisions on their own and working hard. You have to do everything their way and if you don't you could be on the chopping block. Therefore you have to run everything by management or you get the wrong kind of attention.
Amazing how much disconnect there is. If you want make money selling games. It’s pretty simple. Guys like cars, explosions, and attractive women. We want games about men who like to get $h!t done, developed by men who like to get $h!t done.
So I have a few critiques as someone who's worked engineering projects as a worker bee in a sense in today's setting. Now my experience is in mechanical engineering not in coding but I think in terms of project development and management it mostly works to the same process.
Story 1: I actually agree with you on this one, maintaining a whiteboard of unfinished tasks is pretty normal and honestly a lot of people I worked with kept a whiteboard on a cubicle wall with their tasks to be crossed off. Anyone could see those lists pretty easily and it made communicating with the boss and teammates easier. It does seem a bit odd to me that it would be contentious but oh well.
Story 2: I'm not sure what the experience level of your coworker was when they wanted 4 weeks but clearly it was less than you. Sure you may have written this code 3 times but sounds like chances are they never have so they don't know how long it will take THEM when they account for other tasks they have to do or when they account for how it needs to be implemented in their experience. Personally I've had too many times the old guys will come up and say "this is how we used to do it its so simple" when they haven't actually done the same type of work in over a decade because thats not their job anymore. If you want to pass down how you think it should be done that is a good thing. Send them an example of your past work for them to copy or learn from, or hell if it only takes 45 minutes and you can do it like you said...DO IT and say "I want something like this"... this is how you mentor people and pass down knowledge and experience. Give them a day or so to look at it and then ask their thoughts. What you are describing though is a hostile learning environment where you set an expectation with no flexibility for learning and you will be frustrated if it's not exactly how you wanted it and knock performance review points if thats the case.
Story 3: This one isn't so bad except you seem to have an expectation that people would want to join in. Truth is very few younger employees are ever going to be comfortable joining in an argument with the old hats, there is too much at risk for their career. You can't expect them to feel comfortable arguing like that without fostering it first. One way I've had teams foster a healthy dose of this is we would have the more senior (but still non-supervisory) team members setup informal group meetings once a week, so think about 10-15 people lead by guys with like maybe 5-10 years of experience with the rest of the group ranging from 0-5. We would sit for about an hour or however long seemed to make sense and just talk about what we were working on with NO bosses/supervisors/managers whatever you call them in the room. This helped filter down discussion in a relaxed environment and made less confident employees more confident in speaking about their projects. It also helped spread knowledge and experience we each had with our very varied and different projects, keeping us all in the loop. This was particularly helpful since our group was essentially the "miscellaneous projects" group and we needed to have a lot of flexibility and wide breadth of knowledge to function due to a lack of specialization.
Been teaching for college for 20 years. Your insight into why the newbies might be afraid was thought provoking. It makes me question if our feelings first education system is actually making more resilient workers.
Also for the coding example, there are usually a lot of factors to consider, especially in bigger teams code structure needs to be unified so everyone is on the same page and not only one of the devs have a clue what the code is suppose to do and how it works. Thats why "i have done it in 45 minutes" might be true, but have you done it in a way that all other devs can work with it? is it documented so people know what it does when you leave the company? is it low enough stress on game performance?
i really can see the frustration when you come from smaller teams, like "i just did it in the past and in an hour it was done", but if you have 100 devs on a project and everybody would just do what they want it would turn into chaos eventually. Thats why the indie sector will maintain to be THE space for new ideas. But also customers changed, nice game design is not what 90% of gamers actually want, they will buy the 100th COD or FIFA as long as presentation is top notch, try selliing slay the spire to to the masses. So tripple A in its current form means, big investment needs to make sure you get your money back, and since innovative game design is like bottom of the bucket for most customers, they leave that to the indie market and just take the ideas from them and put the money into presentation and accessability - So in the end it does not matter, there are games for everybody and new ideas will eventually reach even tripple a even though they where not created by them, but still there is plenty of innovation, plenty of good quality games, but you just have to pick where you are looking nowadays
@@dennisvogel5982 The example he gave though is so simple that it could definitely be done in a way usable by everyone in under an hour. It's:
- add a data structure to the base AI entity
- update it whenever the entity is attacked, referencing the attacking entity
- sort and sample the list when choosing targets
That's probably 15-30 lines max, depending on how you do the sorting.
45 minutes for this is completely fair for anyone on the team (I would've guessed 20 minutes). If you've written it before, it would be under 10. Maybe you could stretch it out to a day for someone completely unfamiliar with the code base and who's kinda bad at programming and who's distracted by a bunch of meetings throughout the day.
4 weeks is just inexcusably absurd. Anyone who takes that long on this should be fired.
I also don't like that you brought up documentation as an element that would add a bunch of time for this task. The documentation for this isn't needed since any decent naming convention would immediately make it's use clear, and it's completely encapsulated by the AI entity. If it was needed for some reason that I'm missing, it would take 5 minutes.
@@La0bouchere its wasnt exactly for this specific case but in general a lot of work gets forgotten, when a statement is made "this will just take 5 minutes" - heard it a lot, while working in the industry and its 99% of the time not true. When doing prototyping and stuff like that, it might be true but once you are reaching 50 or more people working on a project you cannot just simply "code something" What if that specific call you want to just dump a lot of data into, several weeks in the future is designated to be limited - for example only every second hits get checked, instead of every individual hit ..... suddenly parameters changed and stuff stops working - maybe because the call itself was designed to be changeable in that way, did mister "it takes 5 minutes" check with the departments? usually he has not, so now you have to write a whole new call to dump the code into -.... and this might not be your decision but another department has to make that -suddenly you doubled the calls for each hit - is that sustainable from the server architechture? - this is a bad but kind of pratical example why you do not just code something. - So if you are in the end responsible for delivering on time, you check for everything that could happen and make sure it does not go wrong because in the end it is your responsibility to give estimates that work. if its quicker, and you have time left, nice - but there is nothing worse for planning than give estimates that are too low.
in the end the situation is as follows - if you say 4 weeks and do it in 5 minutes everything is fine - when you say 5 minutes and need 4 weeks you have to explain a whole lot or might lose your job in the worst case, because that guy that wanted to work with your code now cannot - setting off a chain reaction, that might even shift release dates blowing millions of marketing budget.
That is simply not the case when you are 3 dudes in a garage and you are the dude that codes 90% of the game - you know the code, you are the only one that NEEDS to know the code, you have a good enough grasp what and why this call exists and if anything is planned to do with it in the future. There is no other developer waiting on your code. You have not planned 3 years ahead with user story after user story that each have estimates and depend on each other. you do not have billboards on time square rented for your release date. You have not rented hollywood superstars to be in your tv commercials.....
i could write another book about documentation, but believe me, its needed - so i leave it be at this point.
i know what he wants to say and yes its frustrating - you can prototype a running game in a few days with all gameplay relevant systems running these days - but once it gets to production stuff slows down, doubeling team size will only give you about 50% faster production a lot of times but its needed to handle the sheer size of games nowadays. then everything needs to be documented and coded in a way that its easy to handle because live service and patches are the norm. its not commom practice to do things that way because nobody wants to work - its the procedure everybody comes back to after a lot of different approaches failed and i know that from experience
Remember that the only people with parachutes are fighter pilots and CEOs.
It sounds like "cover your a$$" work style. That suggests that the workers are VERY concerned about giving the "leaders" ANY reason to put them on the chopping block. No one wants to have even the tiniest mistake on their record/reputation. They're just trying to stay employed.
Oh Tim, if only you knew. All software development is like that. This attitude is a response to metrics and corporate meddling. Managers that have no idea how software works end up telling developers how to do their work. So they end up padding everything because they don't want to be held accountable for something that's often trying to fit a square peg into a circle.
Bingo!
That's why i think Nintendo is the company that suffers the least problems. At least since Iwata it is handled by old developers.
@@josedeleon1923 Take a look at how Mashiro Sakurai describes the role of video game director and his project management advice in general. I'm coming to realize it's all advice western game directors will really need.
Absolutely. I'm an engineering team lead and half of my job is just listening to the C-suite rant about features that we're missing or that don't do what they should, despite the fact that all we do is exactly what the C-suite tells us to do. So I give them bullshit estimates, we get the work done in half the time (if not less), and then when they reactively pivot to something else, we can redo it and still meet the original timeline. It's the stupidest game.
@@DdavidoffC something I never realized before entering the corporate world is how there are really two types of “driven” people.
Entrepreneurs who want to start their own company and be successful. And followers who want to get paid good money to do what they’re told.
The problem is, the highest decision makers on any project are the second type of person, and that’s never the type of person you want running a serious project.
Thank you so much for your videos, Tim. They have helped me a lot on reflecting on my own design process.
Also thank you for your work in general. Fallout was incredibly influential in my way of thinking growing up, and it is one of the first pieces of art that made me gain an affinity for anarchism and degrowth, which had been guiding principles in my work since.
Loved this! It was like I was listening to my double, but from a tech industry point of view. I used the exact same processes with the whiteboard priority approach, the passionate meetings (intense solution initiatives), pseudo code walkthroughs to support rapid prototyping so we could quickly explore yay/nay decision making, constant end user stakeholder engagement to maintain buy in ensuring support staff feel part of the product and feel responsible for its success. I started to realise I was quickly becoming what is probably now referred to as a "Generalist" and my approach was now at odds with the industry standards that support very specific roles to support planning and scale, but often lead to excessive bureacracy and caution. A generalist drives a car, but the new industry standards would have somebody responsible for the steering wheel, and another responsible for the gearstick etc. The industry is sold on this approach thinking it ensures accountability and redundancy, but in reality it often just leads to an increase in bottlenecks and a rapid loss of product value and money. Funny thing, I also moved my whiteboard approach to many confluence pages that for a long time where met with indifference but I see they are now being used for insights and inspiration, years later.
I'm a game programmer with many years of experience and am asked to give estimates to my producers. It is so common for them to simply double whatever I tell them. I don't argue anymore.
That's what we-devs all tend to do. Not what Tim says.
I think a lot of the fire of the early developers has been lost. I like moving quickly but if I try that within a company, it doesn't go over well. People want to plan, and schedule, and meet, and spec, and document, and ... I mean, everything other than write code and/or prototype. Which are the 2 fastest ways I know to get something done and evaluated.
As an SWE 5 years into my career, I've often padded my dev estimates (although obv. 4 weeks is excessive) because of the following experiences:
I say 5 days, it takes 6, I end up having to explain to the PM "What went wrong", as if an estimate off by one day is a sign of a problem
I get a spec/ticket that's one sentence. I ask for more info, I get told to "just work it out." So I give a padded estimate to account for ambiguity, because I KNOW there will be scope creep, although can you really even call one sentence a scope?
I say 5 days, its ready for QA in 2, QA is under-resourced, it takes them 5 days to get to it. Now I'm having a conversation about how to improve my estimates because it's not production ready in 5 days.
Obv. these are anecdotal, and I'm not advocating for padding estimates as a rule, but I've had so many of the above experiences that when I'm in a work environment where the above experiences have happened, I become, as you say, very cautious
As a software engineer I feel like every year I get less productive (across different employers, industries and customers). More caution, more process, more tools, more everything to get the simplest change implemented. For every $1 spent it requires like $0.80 guaranteed in overhead just to avoid even the smallest amount of risk or responsibility. And it's not even helping, if everything gets so difficult that nobody wants to fix problems or try different solutions the software gets worse in the end.
It's not caution; you're helping to BLOW THE WHISLTE on a job market issue we're ALL seeing. Especially at places where corporate HR are removing so many rules people are able to act like children in a world of adults (hyperbole, but we're not far off now). This is also why Hollywood finds it so hard to make a movie while budgets are astronomical... - A Fellow Dev💚
@@RichardHoelscher Since you're clearly not in the industry (or new to it) - you already get that. Your portfolio allows you to negotiate more pay there or at your next job. When a project does well YOU do well too. Not being guarenteed a job is part of the industry because mobility is a PERK of the industry...
@@MrTickleTrunkwell can go both ways I see the point that was brought up a lot too with people not wanting their name listed since they can receive backlash for a poor project which id hope someone wouldn’t want to update their portfolio with. Tough industry working on eggshells
@@answering248 Not wanting your name on something means it's WAY too bad. But you can take that as a loss and move on to the next project... also that's only a concern on AAA projects - most of the industry is not large studios. They just make tentpole games...
@@RichardHoelscher This doesn't happen in tech, employees have a massive amount of bargaining power and mobility. It's standard to go interview at a different company, get an offer, and use it to demand a raise for your current job.
This is why i enjoy Indie gaming (despite working at a huge game studio). Allows me to focus on my core audience, given them what they expect or want but also have the possibility to drive the game mechanics, the story and other aspect of development however we please.
I love these stories. I had the same experience and ended up writing the module myself because the "developer" said it would take 3 weeks. I wrote it in one afternoon and it never came back with any bugs. This is generally why I don't work with people anymore and just do game jams. I set my own pace and enjoy development rather than deal with mythical deadlines and egos.
Cool story bro.
I think indie games have more investment in their product and they are stiving for more from a place of less. Most of that striving has the potential to directly reward them. That is the driving force of their passion.
Workers in AAA studios often have good cause to be jaded and not feel like they have a stake in the product's success. In an era where AAA titles can make record profits but still have major layoffs for the sake of the CEO's yacht money they have little reason to care about the success of the product. A feature that takes 4 weeks instead of 2 weeks(or even 40 minutes) is barely a blip in the amount of money a hit game can make for the people at the top. And if the programmer is going to get shitcanned regardless then they might as well milk it for all they can while taking it easy. Maybe spend some of that extra time working on their own projects.
I don't know the specific companies in question here. Those are just the optics and the prevailing sentiment among 9-5 office workers, generally. These people aren't cautious. They just aren't passionate and they have good reason not to be. I think the people who stand the most to gain are too far removed from the people actually doing the work to earn the money. Everybody doing the work knows they aren't going to reap a proportional amount of the reward to the amount of effort they put in so they become uninspired and unmotivated. They are there just for the paycheck. And the middle managers are there just to get them to stay on task and get something from them that they can show to their boss and not get fired so they can collect the paycheck, all the way up to the top.
All of this, I am specifically speaking about the AI code incident and it possibly has some influence on the optics of having the whiteboard in a public space. I think the yelling incident truly had nothing to do with the other two and you are probably being too quick to make a connection there.
What a fascinating insight into the inner workings of major game development! Thanks for this.
So, first of all, this is a great video with lots of great points. I have been in software development for 27 years and I have seen the changes as well. However, it feels like you are assigning blame on the developers, when there are some clear and obvious reasons for how and why developers have been conditioned to have this caution.
1. The planning fallacy. Humans are terrible estimators and we all know this by now. However, miss a deadline and get skewered for it by management and product owners.
2. The culture of blame. I have seen this in nearly every organization these days. You don't want your name publicly listed or called attention to, because if anything goes wrong management is on the hunt for who to blame, even though the focus should be on how to fix whatever the issue is.
3. Iterating costs money and the C Suite doesn't want to "burn" money. So you stick to the board and look for easier, "proven" features.
I could write a dissertation on the many other reasons, but the bottom line is that caution now exists where it didn't used to because leadership has conditioned it into developers.
As a developer I was immediately familiar with the Combat AI story as I was guilty of that kind of thing too more than a few times. I think what happens is that developers all start with the attitude of, yea I can do it in few hours, but inevitably you get your nose bloodied few times and you start quoting for more time and some people even start asking for excessive time. For example, sometimes you say a feature takes few hours to make but then that feature introduces a bug that takes you few hours on its own to fix and it looks like you estimated poorly or don't know what you are doing, or someone asks you for this small random thing and you say yes but they keep changing their mind so in the end 2 hours piece of code takes 2 days because of all the changes, or you say yea I can do it but then your actual line manager says you have to fix this very urgent thing first and at the end of the day it looks like you didn't do this small thing which you promised to do or simply it does happen often times especially in complex codebases where a feature that is very simple on the surface is actually very complex because of all the hidden dependencies or legacy code or such and it looks like you are being unreasonable asking for so much time but actually people just dont know the full scope of everything that is involved. Every developer gets into these situations and eventually they try to get away with asking for as much time as possible just to avoid these painful experiences and yea sometimes people even ask for unreasonable amounts of time. And then as those developers become managers they are just like the manager in your story because they have this attitude of; when I was just a developer I could not push back on all these ridiculous requests but when I will become a manager I will have the power to push back and I will protect my team from all these random requests and get them as much time as I can. People do think that way and sometimes they become unreasonable.
Another difficulty is when black box rules make the bit of code you need to work with hard to access in the new place you want to access it.
So like if the Npc aggro list isn't visible to those callbacks yet, then you need to file back up the chain and see where you can inject Aggro-list data - somehow get access to the data in a safe manner, so you can use it in the new location. And that can be a tough restructure if the data isn't already provided.
No wonder all AAA games are trash. All the devs are fucking lazy and take season to fix small bugs
This reminds of a podcast that Mike Stout and Tony Garcia were part of saying they lament how developers in AAA arent able to make games quicker, in a way playing too safe due to several reasons. From his perspective that leads to less opportunities to learn from mistakes or failures or successes in different games since you're locked in on the same ine for years. As you mentioned games cost more to make, and there was a lot of "bad games" made earlier that now experienced veterans in industry are as great as they are.
This year marks my 49th year programming. I have been doing it professionally since 6 months after I finished college. Your evaluation isn't constrained to games it is everywhere. In a world where your hired for your characteristics over your qualifications has led to destruction.
I can't fathom the first story with the guy saying that it will take 4 weeks to code the aggression table.
I mean, I don't work in game development, I'm a tax consultant.
But it sounds to me like I receive a basic tax return from a client, as simple as can be, and tell the client it will take a month to get it back to him, when all I would have to do is fill in his information within not even an hour.
Obviously, things shouldn't be this way, but I can definitely see how they could be, as someone who has worked in enterprise software development. I'm not saying all of this is accurate to the exact scenario, I wasn't there, but I can *imagine* how 4 weeks is reasonable.
So, you're sitting on a long desk in an open office with a hundred other people. There's weeks, or even months of work scheduled for you and your team to work on, all carefully estimated, organized by "epic" in a tool like Jira. Every 2 weeks, a portion of that scheduled work is pulled in to the current "sprint", a 2-week time box which is meant to give development teams a regular cadence for work and reflection. It's the start of the week, a Sprint Goal has just been set, and you're working on your first task, an infrastructure change that's a blocker for 4 other tasks, meaning those other tasks can't be completed until your current task is completed, tested, integrated and deployed.
Someone asks you to make this tiny little change to the code. It's trivial, like 10 lines of pseudocode, it's genuinely not too hard in a vacuum, but you can't start on it right away. If you abandon your current task, you'll be delaying not only your current task, but the 4 other tasks that depend on it. Even if that wasn't the case, the tasks in your sprint have been carefully calculated according to your team's "velocity" to perfectly fill that week, and so if you accept additional tasks, that's likely to cause your team to miss some tasks this sprint. This wouldn't be an issue, except that many companies shortsightedly tie employee and team performance, whether directly or indirectly, to your sprint metrics. Unless the product owner agrees to move some of the currently accepted tasks out of this 2-week sprint to make room, this task will have to wait 2 weeks until the next sprint, and get included then. So we're up to 2 weeks.
Next, while the code is simple in theory. Add an entity ID to a table when damage is taken, or increment it's value if it's already there. But any programmer will tell you that even things that look simple can be quite difficult in a big codebase. There are things that are unclear, even with such a simple task. What counts as an entity for this purpose? If the character is damaged by a physics object, how do we know who threw it? If the character is damaged by part of the environment, should that be included as an aggro target? What about accidental friendly-fire? How is the initial target chosen when no damage has been taken? What happens if an entity that's currently in the map disappears or transforms, changing its ID? How do we prevent an enemy from trying to chase another entity on the other side of the world because they were damaged by them a while ago? Also there's the fact that Bill added a hack that treats health packs as entities which do -100 damage, meaning that it's hypothetically possible for an enemy to become aggroed onto a health pack. None of these are insurmountable problems, but they add up, so we need to discuss and properly specify this. Everyone's busy right now, but we'll bring it up at the sprint planning for the next sprint, and then discuss it over a couple of long, boring meetings. +3 days.
Ok, now it's not as simple as just writing the 10 lines of code, and done. It needs to be integrated with the game engine itself. This table of entity IDs can be represented by a simple hashmap, which would work just fine, except that the player has the ability to quickload and save at any time. We need to make sure that this map of entity IDs is properly serialized and persisted to the save data, or when the player quickloads, every enemy will lose aggro. Could be +2 days if things are bad. We need to write automated tests for this stuff. Yes, it may just be "temporary", but any programmer knows that the venn diagram of "temporary" changes and things that become permanent parts of the codebase is a complete circle. So we need to give it the high level of code readability, quality and testing that we do for every piece of code. We write automated tests for the table itself, the way it integrates with the scene, the way it interacts with other AI rules, the way it's serialized and deserialized from the save data. Could be +2 days if things are bad. There could be more unknown unknowns, things we don't know about that make implementation more difficult, and I'd usually add some padding time for this.
So the code is written, but now it needs to be reviewed by 2 teammates including one senior developer. It'll probably be at least a day before a reviewer even looks at your code (+1 day), and then they leave a comment asking you to change the name of some variable. You do so, but they don't check their emails and re-review the code for another day (+1 day). Then you go through the same thing with the senior developer reviewing your code. They're deep in a complex, fundamental change and can't shift focus, but on the next morning you receive an LGTM (+1 day). Then it goes through QA, which will probably take at least 2 days, probably more, even assuming there are no issues that require rework.
Altogether, that adds up to 20 working days, or 4 weeks. Then the team lead has a discussion with the guy and agrees to throw other work out from the sprint and start on it right away, which removes the 2-week delay at the start, bringing it down to 2 weeks.
Again, this isn't exactly what was happening in the real world case, I can't know, but in every large development company there's a process to follow, meant to ensure quality and reduce communication issues. Whenever there's a process to follow, every stage in that process introduces some level of delay.
How do we get around this? Build small. Small teams can communicate effectively without too much process. Their members all understand the vision of what they're trying to do, so they don't need detailed specifications. A team member with a higher level of personal impact upon a project has a much greater investment in that project's quality and success, and they'll self-enforce quality without the need for a multi-stage review and QA process. Game development is cheaper and easier than it's ever been, and we need fun games made by smaller teams who can work in a truly agile way.
@@Keisuki I respect that you explained a variety of possible bottlenecks with relatively deep examples. I am wondering however, how much time did it take for you to write those paragraphs?
@@danilafoxpro2603 I don't remember, it was a while ago, I type pretty fast though. Management of technical teams is something I care atypically much about, and it's enjoyable to write even if nobody really cares.
Love, i wholeheartedly agree mate. I work in software and im in s very fluid logistics company right now, it's fantastic. If we need to roll out of a hotfix, it can happen tomorrow kind of thing.
My previous company was very much not like this. The GM was the tyrant and everything had to go through him, no matter the department. The software was buggy, releases were slow, everyone was stressed and there was so many meetings. To top it off we were owned by a fortune top 500 company who had a painful HR and there was no room for creativity.
I love this message
i love jank in games, typically not for the jank itself but for all that charm you mentioned that tends to accompany the jank. it's interesting how the general experience of long time gamers parallels the change in attitudes of developers you talked about. games like Baldurs Gate 3 that have charm and ambition and take risks are beyond uncommon these days
I might be biased here, but damn! S.T.A.L.K.E.R has a lot of jenk but it was so risky at the same time that it created a very unique game with a lot of charm and atmosphere, and I love it for that exact same reason!
People call it jank to shrink responsibility of the product being trash. Starfield is a perfect example, can't go 15minutes without jank breaking my immersion. Jank is acceptable for indie games, not triple A games.
Playing lots of Indie games, love em. Very few AAA title seem worth the time. It's the weirdness, quirks, and jank that intrigue me.
I'd offer that there's a difference between jank broken and buggy.
Starfield is more broken or buggy game design. Flying into a planet not doing anything, or merchant inventories being tied to a chest that's hidden somewhere in the world are incomplete design that shouldn't be happening. Like someone asking for a proper vendor system which would take 45 minutes and someone telling them it will take 4 weeks, so they do the workaround instead because the world designers gotta keep going. Neither of them care that people will find it and laugh. They gotta keep trudging along.
Jank would be the physics engine in Zelda BotW. It has to work that way for the trials to function. Side effect is that sometimes it can be manipulated to do silly things outside of that confined space.
The techniques used in Mario speedrunning can be considered jank.
But overall I'd say the more determining factor between jank and broken is whether it's viewed positively/amusing or not by the person playing.
@@Wizardi1111
What's interesting to see is how Mashiro Sakurai describes the role of video game director on his RUclips channel. In it, he mentions an avoidance for running opinions over in any democratic or communal manner, but instead opts to take open feedback throughout development, and constantly informs his team of the vision for the project, and personally does a ton of work review - it seemed implied to me that he would have the final say on any particular piece of work.
Under that system, I don't see how there can be much development caution. The team works according to the directions vision, who naturally takes all the blame and responsibility for the decisions made and the final work that goes into the project no? Who would there be to run around to debating all day?
Is what I though was a standard system that Sakurai was kindly teaching us about, actually unique to his directing style or Japanese culture? I'm curious if there's a real term for it.
I really could not figure out why I could not get into new games. I thought it was my dopamine system that was fried. But then I started playing older games and stayed up all night completely sucked in. I then realized that newer games are just boring, there is no crazy, funny, interesting or surprising stuff going on at all. It’s all the same safe and predictable boredom.
Hey Tim, thanks for sharing this insight. I’m enrolled in a game business program right now and I think this is extremely valuable information for people in the industry to take note of. Helps to hear this at the beginning of my journey!
Sounds like a snowflake problem. If a dude cannot get 45 minutes of work done and needs 4 weeks, fire them. No joke.
You'll be surprised by how productive people become when you stop walking on eggshells around them.
Tim, I have a friend who worked on the development team at Carbine. He never had anything but glowing admiration and respect to talk about in regards to you, and I know that team really enjoyed working there, despite small squabbles that might have gone on. It was a special place and sadly a kind of studio that's dying out, as you say.
Please do not stop preaching passion, you are spot on and this needs to be addressed. Love you Tim and everything you do.
It's true, but also I don't see much of an alternative. I think the issue is that we have no safety in our (American) society. If you lose your job (or other access to money), you lose everything, quickly. Housing, healthcare, transportation, food, etc. That's why people are so terrified of rocking the boat, because there's no other way to avoid drowning. I think that's why people try to avoid passion in the workplace, because they know its not going to be fullfilling, because taking a risk that could easily result in you losing your job is too high a cliff to jump off of. I can't blame anyone for not caring about their job and making it as easy as possible. Unfortunately, the trade-off is issues like this, but to have the creative society we used to have requires us as a collective to agree to make things safer for everyone, which we haven't decided on doing yet.
yea trying to create art shouldnt make or break you
we should be able to freely create and fail if we have to without the repercussions our backwards society imposes
This is why I'm so enamored with VR right now. So many small teams/studios just giving it their all and experimenting. Yea sometimes there's jank and sometimes the games need a bunch of patches but the teams communicate with the player base on discord servers, and you can tell they just want to make the best game they can. Gotta respect it. Nice too that most VR games are $30 or less. Vast majority of AAA gaming bores me to tears, most games are a total step back from stuff we got on the PS2.
One big issue with the VR market is that VR headset manufacturers are trying to create walled gardens in a very niche market. Platform exclusivity only hurts VR.
@@OzzianmanWhich is why I hope Mark cuckerberg and his meta company goes bankrupt and never dare to enter the IT industry ever again. They have done almost irreparable damage to VR gaming as a whole.
I think this was very well put. This is exactly how I felt when I went to University, and after my 2nd full year doing game art and switching from design because I was tired of people not listening to ideas or practical solutions for that matter, covid happened and I just felt like something was wrong with me. In reality though, I'm just passionate, I actually have had to do every role in game dev making 2d and 3d games, both story driven and action. So I know what it's like personally. In the end it broke me down so much that I can't stand working with other people in the game industry. This is honestly sad, and I don't know why it's like this. Why is everyone so sensitive, aren't we all trying to make a game? I have been unwell these past few years but I'm getting back my focus and will produce more games.
Thanks for this message.
> Why is everyone so sensitive, aren't we all trying to make a game?
Well get cancelled on twitter/X for misrepresentation or objectification or some other bullshit, or get review bombed a couple of times for by infantile "gamers" that are literally looking for a way to be offended, and we can continue talking.
I started in the game industry in 2007, and yes I'm seeing the same. I get why people pad estimates, the "agile" approach and working in sprints and milestones is the main culprit, and leads often don't do anything hands on anymore and are just middle managers
Hmm... How exactly did Agile make things worse? Just curious. It's the first time ever I've heard someone saying something like that.
Thank you very, very much, adressing this topic(s). Meanwhile I thought sometimes, that I'm the only one, who has the perception of things going that way. Not only in the games or software industrie as a whole but overall in society. Especially the part where you talked about "yelling at each other without beeing mad, just into it", gave me a big relief because that's my way of discussing topics too. I'm always "very into it" but in the last ten or fifteen years, that as become to be a problem. Glad to not be alone 🙂
I liked this video and the messages behind this video! It's awesome to learn more about the game industry and how it's been evolving over the years. I wish some people and the gaming industry could have a better supportive environment and have more discipline for their work ethic.
This is why the Sega Dreamcast will always be one of my top consoles. Sega took so many risks, developers at the time said the company felt like a AAA indy studio. And as can be expected, it sold so poorly it ran them out of the console space.
Timothy, as a gamer of many years, thank you.
This was a fantastic video, great insight, and open and honest which shows your amazing character.
I've been gaming since Commadore 64; Fallout was a masterpiece and I'm sad to see where it's fallen short since.
As a software dev/lead/agile guy of 15+ years (not in the games industry) I recognize a lot of what you are describing. At my current job I see a lot of tasks that gets estimated to take 3-5 days which I would knock out in an afternoon when I was a junior dev. I really do dislike peoples aversion to pushback in modern development. Everything is decided by consensus. If you disagree and you want to have a conversation about it. If you do not do it in the right way you're seen as difficult. To me it is perfectly acceptable to have an 30 minutes discussion about a topic. Explore every part of it. And still disagree at the end of it. This makes people uncomfortable. I don't think this inherent to agile workflows but it is a prevailing culture today.
That said today I often find things that I would do in 1 hour to take multiple days using modern tools. There is a lot of benefits with modern framework. But everything today is just a lot more complicated and slower. On top of that when I think back to 10 years ago where I worked in a team of 5 developers for the whole organisation vs today. Where I am one out of maybe 100 developers. I feel like I was 10x more productive 10 years ago. Though I will concede the code we produce today is a lot more stable and easier to modify and work with.
I think what a lot of people forget in an agile workflow is that top level management can be considered stakeholders. For your 4 week damage table. I'm sure they've internally discussed it within the implementing team. Probably had a vote about how much time it would take. And from how they view the requirements arrived at what they find to be a reasonable estimation. At this point it would be unreasonable for top level management to go in and directly adjust the time estimation and change nothing else. What makes me frustrated when listening to your story is that the other part seems unwilling to engage in why you are saying 45 minutes and they are saying 4 weeks. If I was a team lead in this situation I would first explain the story as I understand it to you and figure out where the misunderstanding is. Then secondly probably discard the story in our log and start over from scratch. Because clearly the scope of the story is wrong. In this case it seems like they've given up on communication and just want to steamroll what they think is right.
I think I understand the pushback you got against the whiteboard. To me it sounds like what you want is a classical continous flow kanban board. Basically a trello page. But making a lot of assumptions you are probably high level management. You probably have some sprint based agile workflow adopted. And you are probably working across multiple teams in a big organisation. So in essence what you are saying is that you want to impose a secondary workflow over your existing workflow (provided my assumptions are correct). If I as a mere developer make commitments to my team, my scrum master in a 2 week sprint. And then on top of that. I also have my name directly written on a whiteboard from top level management. It puts me in an extremely awkward spot where I either commit to the sprint goal or to the directives of a manager.
I think the solution you ended up doing was probably the best one. You had a list where you clearly communicated what is important. And then product owners and scrum masters looked at that list and planned the sprints accordingly. As to why no one suggested you to do it this way in the first place. I can't understand.
I have to agree that I hate the caution today. I don't even think Agile workflow is that effective for large organisations. Its just that we don't have a better option. And the way things are decided these days just takes a lot of passion out of how development decisions gets made. These days its only about delivering bullet points. Even if the person making the decisions has a great visionary idea. It gets broken down, reviewed and reduced to its minimum viable component before anyone even started coding. 10 years ago. We had conversations like. "Hey man, I tried doing this over the weekend. Have a look at this." and that would lead into a defining feature of the product years down the road. There is no room for that among developers in big organisations.
20+ years veteran here. I’d tell you I’ll have it done in 3 days. Brute force done in 1 day, assuming there’s already an event system. Handler just looks it up in a hash map. Day 2 assuming a huge map, add a cache of players in range, such that only 1 player gets added per frame. Day 3 test plus more than enough padding. If a junior or even an intern told me 3 weeks, I’d give him 1 week, and mentor him 1/2 hour a day. Can’t do it myself, the juniors gotta learn or I’ll have to do everything myself.
Managers always shift blame downstream, he says developers don't have passion anymore. But we hear about layoffs and workplace abuse every week. Every time a game is delayed or comes out with bugs we never hear anything about the managers, but developers get harassed online. The risks are not “uh, I gonna get something wrong and the team will be disappointed” anymore. Is more like “I’m gonna get death threts”
As a 3D Artist with almost 9 years of experience I can say this...
I remember how excited and full of energy I was when I started my first job in game dev. I was all over the place, hyped, working long hours, trying to be innovative and full of ideas, burning like a torch and you know what? Noone wants you to burn bright like a torch. Noone wants you to be full of ideas, full of energy, innovative and hyped cause for some reason they'll think you're a danger to their status. Game dev is full of jaded old farts who think they are all soooo experienced and all sooo important cause they've been there for years and you're just a noob. They will do everything in their strenghts to extinguish thy flame so that you don't burn brighter than they ever were. If you wanna make it in AAA industry you pretty much have to be jaded just as them and hold your head low so it won't be sticking out too much ready to be shot.
All of my ideas were always thrown out to the trash cause "it will take too long", "we don't have a budget for that", "noone at the exec seat will ever agree too that", "it's too unique and risky, we're doing a game for the mass audience", "we just need to stick to what's been done before and is proven to work", "I know you want to be all creative and such, but just follow my order, it will be better this way" yatta yatta yatta.... You get these responses enought times in your carrer and you become just as jaded as them.
" It's too unique and risky, we're doing a game for the mass audience "
There it is, the one thing about triple AAA video game developer and publisher that always self destruct itself every damn time, the mass audience goal, they never work and they never learn. 😑
Love the stories. Been doing games since 2005 and definitely feel ya on this. In particular I find its really hard to get people to build the most sketch of a sketch of a feature first. People want to do it "right" but then we almost always change it so much that the time spent on "right" leads to even slower itteration on the next phase because it was built so "solid" for the old spec.
Not sure how to change that pattern.
The issue that comes often as the source as why people in a dev team want to do right in such a solid way is from the inability for the team members to segment and extract their work from the project's scope and state.
With you example of a sketch of a sketch of a feature, one way of allowing someone to do it right and not too over-the-top-perfect is to request the feature outside of its intended scope. Like requesting that feature to be drawn on a white board without it referring to anything currently in the project.
To give somewhat of an example, if you were working on a game that has zombie, if you were to ask a sketch of a sketch of a how the zombie could be generated dynamically when nothing has been done with the zombie and their animation/AI, you would get as many opinion/solution as there are people understanding various point from the game development. If you were to ask the same question when the game actually have zombies in it, you would get many suggestion that would surround what's already build/applied because of the negative aspect that comes from the idea of scrapping what has already been done.
Another issue often comes from the education received. Back in the 90's and early 2000's, programming classes were mostly following general conventions/languages that weren't directed toward the gaming industry so anyone had to push and learn the trade and develop their creativity through tries and errors. Then as the video game becomes more popular and more companies start looking for new hires, school started to teach game dev-focused courses with the same structure as the general convention/language course which doesn't give much liberty nor attempts at trials & errors. Teachers teaches and students learns what's taught and that's it. Once the student graduate and is released in the wild, he or she has little to no time to have fun trying and immediately turn to "do perfect first" mode as it was taught at school. (At school, being creative and not following convention/perfectionism results in low score and failure.)
I have heard about these "oh yeah, that will take at least 4 weeks" company dynamics. Sounds horrifying and mindnumbing, sitting there 3.9 weeks doing nothing. I think it comes about when a task is marked as "1 day", it takes 2, then the manager gets angry and demands better estimates. From then on all 1 day tasks are assigned 2 and the problem goes away until one of those 2 day tasks takes 3 and the manager is back. Very weird spiral, which ends in everyone on the team perpetuating a false narrative, lying to themselves and others and watching youtube 90% of their working time.
Sounds heavenly to slackers, but your programming skills will atrophy faster than you think. You'll be unemployable after such a job.
Unfortunately they're not unemployable because this is like the entire industry
managers should take risk and fire people who cant do the job
@@josephhetzenauer1890 it's the managers' faults that these people even exist. Try and excel in one of these situations and your most likely reward will be more work and responsibility, without a corresponding increase in pay (you only get that when you find a job somewhere else). The best programmers gtfo, and you are left with the mediocrities who don't mind having a soul sucking job working for idiots all day.
@@josephhetzenauer1890 missing the point. it's the managers who made that happen. the guy is saying the programmer can usually do the task in one day but sometimes it takes 2 instead. and when that happens the manager get's super upset thus causing the programmer to now mark all 1 day tasks as 2 day tasks. and then that continues until you have what should be a 1 day task turn into a 4 week task.
stuff like this happens in retail too. or at least it did to me. i'd get told to do one thing then while doing that thing I'd get told to go do something else. then later get told off for not doing the original thing
@@weirdo3116Lol I'm a brokie in retail and that happens every day.
Hey Tim, this is awesome. I work in a very small studio, where we take risks on some pretty off the wall concepts. Like the literal "blink through time" core feature in Before Your Eyes.
We test ideas by rapid prototyping and "seeing what sticks" (for ideas too). Saying "bye to your babies" is an everyday thing. Sure, it can sting a little sometimes, but it's all part of the fun - and it's worth it.
I think that our being "ok with failure" is what makes our work special. In fact, I know it to be.
Having come from an engineering background (micro-electronics), it took some getting used to rapid prototyping: turning ideas into imperfect reality, trying them out, and then tossing them if they don't work. That engineering perfectionism, though, is counterbalanced by excitement and passion. How much fun it is.
I feel fortunate working in a small team where ideas and decisions flow quickly. Also, a team that is not afraid to dispute ideas in an impassioned way. I am stoked by what I do, and who I do it with. I work with an incredible group of people who hold each other accountable while being advocates for one another.
In the example you shared about the individual who cited 4 weeks, my eyebrows did raise. In our small team, that's just sort of an everyday thing that you might switch to between tasks as a chore for somebody. I also do not take this employees behavior as a sign of competence or ill-will, but, rather, compelled by fear - a fear of failing (asking all the "what if's") and perhaps fear of being overworked. One cannot force a person to undo this fear or expect better performance by pushing them to act differently, but rather addressing the root cause of the problem. Forcing or imposing on an individual to act differently, rather than fixing the root issue, just causes new issues. And that's what I am hearing from you here.
Maybe employees have been worked very hard in the past and are over correcting for the past.
Or, maybe, there are leaders (and it only takes one) who are condescending or set unrealistic expectations, e.g. calls an emloyee out by name when the employee screws up (etc toxic things). But leaders are there to shield those who they serve (employees), while holding those employees to account - and helping them scope and plan, etc. - and sharing accountability with them when things go wrong.
Ps. I just want to make clear that the above para is meant generally (esp in large orgs), not at all a hunch about you or your leadership. I'd work with you any day. You are thoughtful, considerate, passionate and principled. The kinds of things I think anyone would want in a boss.
Bring back creative artists not afraid to make original games. Some developers just give games a magic feel. Tim is definitely one of them. I would trust him with my life.
Bring them back? What you're seeing isn't a lack of creative, fearless artists, it's a lack of creative freedom. The higher ups in the COMPANY refuse to take risks, therefore the creative artists that work for said company are restricted in what they can do. It's a soulless, machine-like corporate structure that rips the human element out of the equation and produces streamlined junk.
I have a million innovative ideas for games but they'd never be considered if I were to work at one of these big companies. But it's a complicated situation, because it's hard to argue against caution when it comes to losing 100's of millions of dollars. Do you really want to risk failing when there are formulas already proven to work? It's easy to say "Just risk everything like you guys used to do" when you're not the one who has to pay the bill when everything comes crashing down.
But I say that not to defend the corporate structure I just bashed a few sentences ago, I just think the issue is complicated and solutions are easier said than done. There definitely needs to be less bureaucracy and more creativity flowing if we want to see truly innovative AAA games. But that's just AAA, the indie scene is blowing up and is filled with a ton of innovation.
So well said and it applies to any corporate structure these days. The people at the very top have no idea how anything works and slow production down from the top to bottom. No one wants to take responsibility for anything because the goals of the company are so disconnected from reality. Fire people who don't want to take accountability, fire anyone that doesn't understand the process. Pretty simple, but once a company gets big enough it just becomes a web of bad direction and passing accountability.
Big compagny like gouvernement
Its not really size, it's whether the company is managed by the founder or not. The big game companies in 2000-2010 were still being run by the founders. After that they switched to professional managers. A good counterexample is Tesla, massive company, public, but still extremely efficient and actually capable when it comes to what it's trying to do.
This video made me realize what I've been doing wrong when learning to program, I was being too careful to write a good looking code. Thank you for this video Tim!
As a software developer of many years, I'd like to point out that there is some nuance to this. While you definitely want to be able to deliver something instead of endlessly iterate over the same piece of code, you also don't want to necessarily deliver something that "just works" in the least amount of possible time. There is a balance to be struck. You do want to try and make your code, uh, "good looking" as you put it. I'd rather call it readable, scalable and maintanable. However, going off of Tim's story, it's also important to understand what the goal is for the code you're writing - in his example it was supposed to be a quick poc to test other things out and not necessarily production ready code, so you might be ok spending way less time iterating than you normally would, as you are sure to come back to that funcitonality and improve it later.
@@TheSoiaIt isnt a hard concept. You write good code anytime you write real (permanent) code, but you don't reiterate over it more than once. You move on.
It really is that simple: Write good code once then let it go.
I'm learning coding right now and honestly I'm pretty optimistic with my mindset being much older, take risks, either it works, or you can try again and know where it went wrong.
I don't see being told to do something or figure out a problem as being talked down to or preyed upon. I know if I'm solving a problem, then I solve the problem, ask questions if I need to, and if I don't solve it right, then we can talk it out and we can learn something.
I do think Indie studios are ahead of the curve by being more daring, and I think consumers need to be more forgiving when devs "Try" something, the current atmosphere of everything trying to be big ending up as "The blunder of the century" and a source of ridicule and stalking streamers and going "game bad" over and over in chat for 5 hours is, quite frankly, a mental illness and a mass psychosis event. It certainly adds very unnecessary stress.
Before I started to learn coding, I always thought everything was very rigid "Only one way to solve any problem", but I've learned so much (And I've learned so little so far) but I've discovered just how much freedom there really is in it, and I feel like a lot of young people in the development space is in this cookie cutter "Follow the instructions on the homework exactly" mindset, as per the eternal student mindset, where you do what your professor wants and no more, trying to strike out on your own or being left with an assignment that isn't perfectly clear is mysterious and dangerous.
That's the best part of engineering, there are multiple ways to tackle a problem. Of course, later down the line you'll look at what you wrote and be kicking yourself at how badly designed it is, but that's apart from the point. if you get it working, who cares, you'll make better stuff later. The way I learned to code is for about a decade or so, I shut out the world and everybody's 'best coding practices this' and 'best coding practices that' etc..., and just made a few games, and one bigger one over the years. Later on, the best practices came to me as I just figured it out myself, and it was personally way funner that way, but it was more so "I want the computer to do this" and then looking up guide after guide online and forums and reading how to do things.
The blank slate you can look at is insanely inspiring, you can make ANYTHING, literally anything happen in the virtual world. It's more addictive than the most addictive MMO.
@@astrahcat1212 This is almost exactly the comment I needed to know I wasn't just mistakenly presuming what I thought about it. Just trying and getting something out there to then change, or toss out as I make better, and I'll get better because I'll have experience as my teacher and I'll be sure to make lots of mistakes to learn from.
I've made my own game too, plus doing some online programming courses.
Hope Tim keeps making these videos for a long, long time. Very insightful, very articulate, just great little diary entries, if we can call them that.
Thank you for getting that off your chest! I am a new gaming RUclipsr who is a magazine editor and designer IRL, and who once owned a local newspaper. Story two reminds me of my young reporters during that time. They always wanted more time to get things done than the elder crew and I knew was necessary-especially with investigative pieces-largely, I think, because of the risk involved. RUclips recommended your channel to me because I'm currently playing Fallout 3 on my channel, and I'm glad it did! Thanks for the insight. Thanks also for the videos about the original Fallout's development, and for making the game in the first place. I always put a small message of thanks to you in my video descriptions for Fallout. A commentary playthrough of the original is on my production calendar for next year, and I'm looking forward to revisiting it after 26 years. Have a great day!
I'm involved in dev stuff (not games) and developer estimates are insanely infuriating. I believe the quality of developers has gone down as the quantity of people in the field has increased. And the senior devs/tech leads/CTOs/etc are rarely incentivized to take sides against their own people. My best work has always come out of "squads" where a small, mixed team works directly. In those squads, one good developer is worth 10 cautious devs.
"If the amount of programmers doubles every N years, then at any time half of all programmers have less than N years of experience." And it doubled frequently over the past couple decades!
hehehe, those lazy devs should be greateful they have a chance working with you.
They may have this delusion that the company is lucky to have them, but in fact it's the other way around.
40 hours work week? Away with that leftist nonesense.
@@an_imminence Well, that's because 'the barrier of entry is lower!' but that isn't the case if you specialize in a skill, for example GPU programming and architecture, C, C++, or hey assembly or something and take a year to learn the really difficult math and processes, or just in general the stuff that people are afraid to learn. The more difficult it's perceived to be, the less saturation there is in general.
To quote Office Space, "That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled."
The only reward for working quickly and efficiently is more work. When you have to move job to job to get a decent raise, why be a try hard?
"I'M NOT YELLING, I'M JUST PASIONATE!"
No really, it's hard to imagine Tim yelling at someone. XD
this isn't just a thing in the game development sphere, this is the same things that are happening in corporate enterprise development. Recently I was on a project that needed something done quickly, and for me it would take less than a day, but because they don't give me the job to implement it, they have to go to an offshore team of devs, they came back with an estimate measured in weeks. This is becoming more and more commonplace now. Estimates are getting padded out of control. I have no idea what these developers actually do all day, because it doesn't take as long as they say it does.
What do they do most of the day? They dont work.
Capitalists exploit workers to the point of having slavery without the costs of slavery.
So whenever wage slaves can, they fight back. Programmers are high skill jobs who work under people who have no clue about what programming is or how it's done. Essentially theyre magicians to these people. Since they are expensive to replace, the programmers can fight back against wage slavery by pretending to work 90% of the time. They probably literally play WoW, surf reddit/tiktok, and watch porn most of the work day. Theyre smart enough to hack and work aroubd any monitoring, if even monitored.
All wage slaves do this to some extent if they can. White collar office jobs pushing paperwork is all about slacking off in the morning, doing a little work, then slacking off the remainder of the day - especially the last few hours before clocking out. Those who cant cheeze the system are considered to have brutal jobs where they are treated like animals. That's because they are. Everyone else cheezes their way to sanity and a more realistic work day of 2-4 hrs of actual work and the rest looking busy.
Remember Minesweeper?
You're a hero. Thank you for saying it like it is
I think there was a very narrow window in the 90s to early 2000s for video games to become a truly great artform, but it was ultimately closed due to an emerging industry that wanted to 'perfect' the art for maximum enjoyment for a wide audience. But great art can't be 'perfected', it's made intuitively, not consciously, so 'game development caution' has created products instead.