Letters to the Editor

Can a Game Make You Cry?

Those parts of the process that are software development may benefit from software development practices but trying to shoehorn a process that is fundamentally not software development into a software development style is bound to fail.

Do you think Spielberg follows SCRUM and Pair Directing as he makes his movies? I doubt it. To me, games are about a game director (and his team) expressing themselves through games to make entertainment similar to a movie director. All entertainment works this way, music, movies, books and games. Creative processes like movies IMO would never work through some formulaic system.

It's precisely that creative process which makes making games fun and enjoyable. Convert it to software development and it will turn into just a boring job where I punch in from 9 to 5 and fulfill the functional specs on my scrum goal list. Yuck.

-George

From The Lounge: [Re: "Friction Costs" by Jason Della Rocca] Oh gimme a break George, you're expressing one of the biggest misconceptions I've heard from some people in the game development community :) Sure, go ahead and look down on professional engineering practices as somehow not applicable to game development. Such an artiste...

I will grant you that having a formal "process" does not guarantee quality. For example being rated CMMI5 doesn't mean you make good products, it just means you passed a test. However, having a disciplined mindset when you approach your development, having decent processes in place, and then adhering to those processes is a big help. Next you're going to say that you're too busy coding to worry about creating a requirements document.

First off, the lack of any formalized development practices are probably the biggest failure of the industry... and I'm not talking about using a CM tool, which obviously most developers have mastered. That's not really rocket science. I'm talking about stepping up a notch where people actually use better project management skills in all areas of game development, not just software. WTF else would we be hearing about games suddenly switching from 3rd person to an FPS perspective in midstream? Or shipping without multiplayer support. Uhhh, that's not really a software issue, it's a failure to identify key UI or technology requirements, track risks, and mitigate them early.

But that's OK, I get the same attitude from our systems engineers. They don't "get" the whole define-how-your-system[game] -works-before-you-write-the-code part. What's their product? Oh yeah, a Word document. Doesn't have to be logically consistent, or god forbid actually execute. If you could, it would delete its own source out of embarrassment and then core dump.

-"CMMI5 and Hacking Away"