I'm reminded of the Chandler project, funded and directed by Mitch Kapor. The intention was Lotus Agenda, reimagined for the 21st century. But that didn't work out. See Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg. It's a very sad story. I loved Agenda, and Chandler had so much damn potential! So it goes.
“It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
281–290 of 392 posts
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
I myself learned it from Rich in the very talk I linked to a few years ago and I'm the first to admit I didn't make that distinction beforehand. I've met more developers unaware of the distinction than otherwise, which is why I'm curious as to why you think it has become a meme? Also note that english isn't my first language (I'm french Canadian) and even here in french the distinction is seldom made.
In colloquial English, no. The distinction between two main types of simplicity, those of parsimony and elegance, has been a long-standing philosophical topic [1]. In engineering, the so-called KISS principle (first coined as such in the early 20th century) has always had the implication of minimalism and implementation simplicity, in contrast to mere ease of use. Fred Brooks wrote a famous paper in 1986 [2] perfectl…
"historically illiterate" are pretty strong words. Actually everyone is historically illiterate by these standards because the ideas that any one person is familiar with is a vanishingly small percentage of all the ideas the human race has ever had. Furthermore, the origins of ideas are impossible to trace with any great precision. Is the most famous person the person with the best ideas? Was the person with access to the printing press the person with the best ideas? Frankly it strikes me as a form of intellectual hipsterism to be bothered so much by this.
Rich Hickey gained fame for this because he stated an idea very clearly and compellingly, this is non-trivial and should not be so flippantly dismissed as just recyling old ideas—all your ideas are recycled too.
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#283People are acting like the game wasn't able to be made. The issue is it was made but the sales didn't cover the costs. "At first we could not believe that our “baby” was not more successful, in our emotions we started looking for explanations not related to the game. Maybe gamers are just spoilt brats, bashing on everything, maybe there is an oversaturation of indie market, maybe all the free-to-play games by big stu…
Looking at some of the negative reviews on Steam, it's not a matter of entitled gamers (and gamers are the most self-entitled demographic in history...). Plenty of the negative reviews I've seen so far are long, and a prime criticism is the 2-hour gameplay time. A few also mention problems with bland gameplay. Everyone agrees that it's beautiful, but it doesn't matter how beautiful your game is if it's short with no replay and the gameplay isn't solid.
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#284I wanted to believe that a team of 6 to 10 people could make a game that looked and felt AAA. Boy was I wrong! When we made Crash Bandicoot (with a team of 7), it was already virtually impossible to make a AAA game with 6-10 people, and that was 20 years ago. I tell inexperienced entrepreneurs to take their honest best estimate and multiply by 10. Or, as Mark Cerny (our producer on Crash) used to tell us, "add one an…
I lived with this Mark Cerny rule for a few decades, and it was mostly true. But finally after I'm over 50 I came to proper and good estimates now. Mostly because I'm a much more experienced now.
2d == 1.5d, 1w == 5d and so on.
But game programming is like architecture. There's so much more to do.
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#285Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#286I wanted to believe that a team of 6 to 10 people could make a game that looked and felt AAA. Boy was I wrong! When we made Crash Bandicoot (with a team of 7), it was already virtually impossible to make a AAA game with 6-10 people, and that was 20 years ago. I tell inexperienced entrepreneurs to take their honest best estimate and multiply by 10. Or, as Mark Cerny (our producer on Crash) used to tell us, "add one an…
Issues with estimating, particularly something like this, mostly comes down to meta-ignorance: you don't know what you don't know. Given a particular problem of a similar sort to something he's worked on, an experienced engineer will be able to list 10 different issues that might crop up. An inexperienced engineer won't know of those potential problems and will just see the most optimistic path possible. When you're…
That is great advice.
Whenever I'm about to build something big, I first start thinking about things that would be hard to do, or perhaps that I even don't know how to do yet. Then I build prototypes of those to make sure I can to it and do it efficiently.
Once all pieces are ready, it's just a matter of putting them together which is straightforward and you have some chance to actually estimate the time.
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
What state do you live in?! I make 20k less than that as a junior dev.
Seattle, Washington. Fresh out of school (with a master's), and 120k base before bonuses/stock. And I have the lowest compensation out of all my friends who graduated with me...
72k seems pretty decent for a jr developer without a graduate degree. I started around 65k fresh out of school with a BS as did most of my friends.
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is all from the top of my head. Credentials: I play a lot of video games. AAA game (typical example: Skyrim): * Sells for $50-$60 * Has cutting-edge graphics and (generally) runs on the newest generation of hardware * Is available on most/all gaming platforms * (Nowadays) Usually has some celebrity involvement (Skyrim had Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Michael Hogan. Oblivion had Patrick Stewart.) * 20+ hou…
I haven't played a game in 10+ years. Kind of miss it. If you had to pick one console game I should play what would it be?
Pick up The Orange Box (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Box). It includes Half Life 2, (plus the two sequel episodes), and Portal. Portal is a fantastic game, with a surprising amount of story given the fact that it appears at first to be a fairly simple puzzle game. Half Life 2, is a great first person shooter, again with great story.
What I like about these games is that they're immersive, without being overly long or tedious. You can play through Portal in a few evenings, without feeling like you're missing out on hundreds of side quests. The gameplay is tight, fun and innovative.
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is all from the top of my head. Credentials: I play a lot of video games. AAA game (typical example: Skyrim): * Sells for $50-$60 * Has cutting-edge graphics and (generally) runs on the newest generation of hardware * Is available on most/all gaming platforms * (Nowadays) Usually has some celebrity involvement (Skyrim had Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Michael Hogan. Oblivion had Patrick Stewart.) * 20+ hou…
AAA games are frequently one platform, generally either PC for UI reasons or locked into a particular console as an exclusive.
PC-only AAA games are incredibly rare these days. I'd say most AAA games are on as many platforms as possible to have as many sources of revenue as possible to recoup dev (and marketing) costs. The exceptions are games that get a large amount of funding to be single platform by the platform's owner and there's no real "owner" of the PC platform (arguably Microsoft, but their focus is on Xbox) to do that.
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I don't understand how they can not give anything at all to all the people who poured money into their kickstarted. What does it say about crowdfunding?
It says that people don't understand what Kickstarter is: you are investing in a project, not buying a product. Investments carry risk.
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