Editor's Choice

Who's Your Daddy?

In the case of crunch, on an immediate level, some silver bullet is better than no silver bullet, because the fact is, going home is good for the game.

Don't Make Me Turn This Game Around
We know going home is good for our ultimate productivity. It's been established in software engineering for years. But we hate to admit it. It's counterintuitive in a sense ("What? Leave? Right now? But we're so close!") - and especially when you're riding the adrenaline wave, it seems like the sensible thing to keep going until the job is done.

The problem is you're never "so close" when you think you are. You're usually about six hours from "so close," and that curve becomes exponential with exhaustion. Despite knowing this, despite being rationally aware of it, no one wants to be the one to send people home. Yeah, it's stupid, but it's the way things go - even though most of us have had the strange and heady experience of suddenly realizing the answer to a problem that's been plaguing our (fuzzy, sleep-deprived, shut down) minds for the last several tens of hours once we get a shower or a little rest.

Setting baselines for working practices is slowly percolating through the industry. It starts simple; in adverse conditions, Yeast says. "Very quickly, productivity begins to decrease, and there's a point at which it dives. I guarantee you, if you take away the weekend for people, that'll kill it." Like everything else, managing productivity becomes part of a large strategy that must remain flexible, but baselines are key, Yeast says, as a metric to measure your working strategy against.

Making the call to go home is great, but the real problem needs to be solved long in advance. Because parents have a stake in going home, they tend to be more likely to enforce reasonable development practices, such as code reviewing, continued learning (including shared technology and techniques) and unit testing. You know, the stuff we really ought to be doing all along. The passionate, fiery, bravado-stuffed code cowboy will scoff at such things: no, we don't want to use someone else's code! We'll build it ourselves! We don't have time for unit testing! Commenting code takes too long! You should be able to understand it by looking at it!

I'm harsh on programmers, but this attitude is everywhere, and it is plain and simple immaturity. Enter the parents. Not only are they practiced in foresight, they're also practiced specifically in countering impatient attitudes. Parenting leaves no room for illusions; because they have a very real and unflinching stake in going home, they'll be on the lookout for better ways to make the development process smoother. Find a game with low ratings and you will have found a game that spiraled into (or started from at the outset) deathmarch and out-of-control management every time. And increasingly, find where the parents are happy - find where they're staying - and you'll find studios reliably delivering games.

Yeast and Saulnier both agree that the greatest asset a parent brings to a team is perspective. Knowing when to let go is a major, if sometimes painful, part of the parenting process. Saulnier says, "It's corny, but as a parent you learn to care for what evolves, even if it is not what you would do. You appreciate your kids for what they are growing into and enjoy the process of seeing how they grow and the people they turn into. This is very similar to a game title for me - with all the input from the team, the licensor, publishing partners, the particular challenges, creative and technical. So, like kids each grow differently, and have different strengths and weaknesses."