no-crunch development (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Monday, August 07, 2017, 13:10 (2752 days ago) @ Ragashingo

Yeah... programming isn’t like testing. You can’t just assign 300 guys to a problem and expect it to get done in an hour.

I used one example that was easy to quantify. I hope you can realize that not all testing problems are found that way. You know how long it would take to clear the whole game if there were no bugs, and you know how long it takes to investigate the average bug, and you have a sense of how buggy the code is at this stage in development, and then you gives yourself a little cushion in your estimate and there you go.

Programming is as much a creative endeavor as writing or painting

Absolutely!

Saying once you’ve made one game you know how long it will take to make another one makes just as little sense as saying once you’ve published one novel you know how long it will take you to publish the next one.

I completely disagree. A book publisher knows about how long it takes to write a book, they know how long it takes for a brand new author, and they know how long it takes for a grizzled vet. They know George RR Martin takes forever because he's that sort of guy, and they know Danielle Steele can turn them out twice a year. The individual author might not know, but not many authors write more than a handful of books - they lack the experience to give a reliable estimate.

And that experience matters. An experienced, professional painter knows about how long a painting takes. You want a 12'x9' portrait? That takes this long. A 1'x1' landscape takes that long. And so forth.

For some, the labor of love is a nebulous task, never quite finished, but for professionals who need to turn out finished products in order to pay the bills, deadlines are a thing they can estimate. You're not making a masterpiece, you're making a living. Ideally both, but realistically it doesn't often shake out that way.

I don't test video games anymore. Now I'm a TV editor and an actor. And I know about how many pages a scripted drama will get through in a day's shooting (6-ish, depending on the production), and how many minutes of polished footage I can churn out in a day (2 minutes). On my last show, I know it took 5 hours just to do the graphics in act 1, but that act 5 only took 30 minutes. And I know that every time network changed the graphics we lost two weeks of scheduled man-hours to update those graphics.

I also know it probably would take longer for Cody's line of editing, because he works in film where everything has to be, as we say in TV, "feature quality" which requires far more attention to detail than TV does. I don't actually know how long it would take him, but I could always shoot him a message and ask if I need that info in order to give estimates to my boss.

My point is, part of operating at a professional level is gaining the personal experience to be able to give reasonable timeframes for how long your work will take. Video games are tricky in that the current business model involves burning out a lot of inexperienced people, which means they lack the experience and professional connections to know if the deadlines they were given were reasonable or not. I can give testing estimates because I did it for 13 years. When I first started I had no clue how long things would take and I just took my boss' word as gospel.

Again, it comes down to the boss being an effective manager. They need to know these things.