Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

In Curt We Trust

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Vaporware till proven otherwise.

So is Carbine Studios. Ooooooh snap.

Draegan said:

So is Carbine Studios. Ooooooh snap.

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The most expensive vaporware ever.

Tananthalas said:

I suggest you be more observant then. I was in the military for all of 14 months when I met a group of people not directly affiliated with DoD but performed...services for them.

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Wow 14 whole months? So just why did you get booted out since that is not a proper enlistment time period, drugs? homo? unsuitable for military service? couldn"t hack doing your job when ordered?

As to what I said before you just once again proved my point. Those people performed services for DoD but were NOT an Agency of the Government or DoD. A civilian cook for the Army is not an Agency employee they are a civilian employee....much different animal and if you don"t see that well not worth explaining.

Well, what I"m really interested in is the particulars of your military careers and experiences. So much so, in fact, that if you guys could copy your day to day logs and journals here I"d probably spend the next few months sifting through it and jotting down notes of my own about them.

Oh wait. No I"m not.

re: Crunch, how much role does distribution/publishers/whatever outside the gaming studio have in creating crunch time? Do they even give a shit how good or bad your game is when it ships beyond possibly finding that diamond in the rough ala Guitar Hero? What would happen if there was Steam-like distribution available for everyone, and on every console?

James said:

re: Crunch, how much role does distribution/publishers/whatever outside the gaming studio have in creating crunch time? Do they even give a shit how good or bad your game is when it ships beyond possibly finding that diamond in the rough ala Guitar Hero? What would happen if there was Steam-like distribution available for everyone, and on every console?

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To get away from the military argument, here is Capp"s response via an interview w/ Joystiq:

Joystiq interview: Epic"s Mike Capps responds to accusations of "exploitative" working conditions

Crunch is crunch; admin, press demos, magazine covers, a simple lack of productivity...all of it can induce crunch. If it gets your panties in a wad, you"ll probably have a hard time contributing to a successful AAA title (will always be some exceptions to the rule but whatever ).

CylusSoulreaver said:

To get away from the military argument, here is Capp"s response via an interview w/ Joystiq:

Joystiq interview: Epic"s Mike Capps responds to accusations of "exploitative" working conditions

Crunch is crunch; admin, press demos, magazine covers, a simple lack of productivity...all of it can induce crunch. If it gets your panties in a wad, you"ll probably have a hard time contributing to a successful AAA title (will always be some exceptions to the rule but whatever ).

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When that vid was first posted in this thread I said I was chewing some things over about it and would post on it - I"m still chewing it over. I"ll say this though for now - it reinforces everything I"ve said about best practise and the culture of organisations.


Mike Capps is obviously a guy who wants to do the best he can, who is prepared to learn, who is driven, who wants to look after his people, who is committed to producing the best product he can.

Brett Close is obviously a guy who wants to do the best he can, who is prepared to learn, who is driven, who wants to look after his people, who is committed to producing the best product he can.


Why then does Mike almost snarl with disdain and contempt at Brett in a couple of places when Brett is talking about development cycles and working practises. Which one of them is right ?


The answer is : they are both right.


They are both right because the practises and principles they are talking about can only be put into context by considering the culture of their respective organisations. The difference is that Brett understands both cultures and could operate effectively at Epic or 38S, but Mike wouldn"t be able to run 38S.


Its the principles I"ve been on about for a while now - its the difference between the manufacturing industry pre and post Deming. Mike wouldn"t understand that - he would think I was talking about process certification, statistical analysis and heaps of paperwork. If Brett reads this he would understand it inside out.

Its the paradigm shift that the industry needs

If the interviewed was honest and I suppose he was, then I must say it has to be good working there.

I found amusing what the guy who did the interview transcript typed:

"It"s a marathon, not a sprint. Hold back. Please don"t give me everything you"ve got right now cause your gonna burn out."

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Your gonna burn out.... your...

Grammar, when did it die?

/rage

CylusSoulreaver said:

Crunch is crunch; admin, press demos, magazine covers, a simple lack of productivity...all of it can induce crunch. If it gets your panties in a wad, you"ll probably have a hard time contributing to a successful AAA title (will always be some exceptions to the rule but whatever ).

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Certainly there are circumstances where Things Come Up and in order to take advantage of an opportunity your people have to put in extra effort beyond the 40-hour week. That"s the nature of the beast, not just in the games industry but in any field where you need to be nimble.

The kind of crunch that crushes souls is, for lack of a better term, "planned crunch." That is, a production schedule is set up with the assumption that everyone on the team will spend the last six weeks of a dev cycle working 60 hours in order to meet the minimum goals. That"s blatant mismanagement.

You definitely don"t want people to be required to crunch in order to meet their typical goals. But if producers have scheduled the appropriate amount of time for tasks and someone on the team goofed around for the first half of the milestone and suddenly has to work a 60 hour week in order to meet their goals, well, that"s kind of on them.

Also, if you"re coming up on a deadline and you have people who stay extra hours--not to meet their goals, but to do everything they can to make sure what they"re working on is extra awesome--that"s a kind of self-imposed crunch that has a lot of positives. At that point your producers have to be watching that this kind of thing doesn"t get excessive and that you"re not letting someone work 60 hours for weeks on end just because they"re enthusiastic. Even with the best intentions, something is going to suffer under prolonged conditions like that.

Frankly, we"re in a creative industry here. While you can schedule according to burn-down rates and gathered metrics, you can"t schedule out inspiration and creativity. I"ve personally been facing deadlines where I haven"t been able to find the creative spark I wanted, only to have a burst of inspiration in the eleventh hour that makes me work extra hours to meet the quality bar I set for myself. Is that a bad thing? I don"t think so--that"s the way I used to write major papers back in college, and it served me well. And once again, I"m the one who put myself into that position.

So crunch isn"t some black and white issue, and in Capps" defense, I think that"s what he"s trying to say. To make a blanket statement that working more than 40 hours is evil is kind of silly. It really depends on the circumstances, and as long as it isn"t required in order to meet the baseline deliverables for your project, there can be positive aspects to it. So long as it"s done within same limits, there"s no need to punish a studio for giving employees the flexibility to work the way they"re comfortable working.

(And in order to point this back at 38 and justify Flight"s mancrush on Brett , it is absolutely the goal of our leaders here that we plan smart so that mandatory crunch doesn"t need to be imposed.)

A good question to ask is what you (not directed at you specifically, Moor) consider "crunch." Anything over 40? 45? 50-60+? Whether or not you have a family/relationship is also going to affect that. For single blokes like me, a few extra hours a day isn"t really going to hurt (is even more lovely w/ overtime) but for someone with kids, that"s really going to cut into quality time with them and the Mrs.

Preferrably, I"d never work on the weekend; I have no problem putting in 11-12+ hour days during the week if it means that I don"t have to show up on the weekend. Now, that doesn"t mean that I"d want to do that for the full life of a project but as stuff hits the fan, so be it. 55-60 hour weeks are cake but, again, it"s not for everyone. I generally have too much time on my hands during "normal" 45h/week periods, heh. Need to move to the beach once this project gets out the door, or close to it, heh.

I think Moor said it great and this is often a concern that I am presented with at my company. No one cares about crunch times, or if some bad shit goes down on 4pm Wen. and now a few people have to stay to get the customer/client back on their feet for tomorrow morning. Shit happens and that"s life.

What pisses people off is when "crunch" no longer means crunch, it just means normal. Usually this is because people underschedule or underbudget projects and the shit rolls down hill to the little guy, the programmer or whatever. So management heads home and all the grunts are stuck there until 9pm week in and week out because no one wanted to listen that the project would take 10 weeks and sales told people we can have it done in 6.

rangoth said:

So management heads home and all the grunts are stuck there until 9pm week in and week out because no one wanted to listen that the project would take 10 weeks and sales told people we can have it done in 6.

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This can also occur between departments (art/design/coding), not just management. If you"re pipeline is ass and it takes hours to get updated art or code/code-dependant assets to the designers, you"ll end up seeing those former departments going home as soon as their fixes are verified. QA and production then has to wait on the designers to ship the build out and it gets all sorts of late. Goes without saying that a solid pipeline and tools should be damn near your highest priority, at least if you want to iterate quickly and cut down on man-hours.

When I first started in this industry I just had the college level understanding of it all. Now I"ve only been involved about 6 years so I am far from an expert but I feel I"ve learned more in that time than all of college....at least about reality and what really works and what doesn"t.

I couldn"t agree more with the pipeline comment. Also of note is the ever popular resource triangle. At my first job that thing was a point of many jokes! We had a giant version in the dev. area and people would move the pin to all these stupid locations to indicate the problem of the day. This was compounded by many other issues including a boss that everyday he came in would bring with him a new feature he thought of while taking a shit the night before and now 2 people who would switch full throttle to implement it....at least to 50% before it was determined it won"t work or the customer doesn"t want it and the entire idea is scrapped, but it was a perfect way to waste 2 developers for a few days and fall behind schedule

Anyway I think we all get it. There is just so much that can go wrong and while I used to mock the idea of a "project manager" I"ve since seen GOOD ones and they are miles above and beyond what I ever expected. That position, which is kinda of like a manager, can range from a reject who can barely forward emails all day and never really do anything at all, to someone who really can coordinate and exchange ideas and make sure things are on task to both his superiors and protect the people on his team and let them do their work.