Actually feels like we're in good shape for E3. For the first time ever--that I was involved, anyway--we're showing some of the actual game instead of proof-of-concept stuff that we're planning on scrapping later. It runs anywhere from a half hour to three hours before it crashes. We worked a lot of overtime the past couple of months, sure, but it's been 50-60 hour weeks, not 24-7. Which makes me think of something I just read in DeMarco and Lister's *Waltzing With Bears*: they say it's more likely for your deathmarch projects to be low-value projects. The logic being that if your project is of high value to the company, they'll do it right and give you the resources you need, but if they're not into the project, they'll shaft you for resources and tell you to work extra hard.

Experiences

Alex Bortoluzzi was telling us about his most touching moment at E3 two years back; we were demoing Spider-Man and a guy in a wheelchair came up and played the demo over and over again. Alex said the guy was a little misty eyed.

I think that's the most important part of what we do; we give people experiences that they cannot have in real life. This is something novels, movies, and television aspire to do but can not. I've believed this ever since I read Richard Powers' Plowing The Dark, a novel about a team of people creating a virtual reality experience. Powers ties it all in with games and narrative, places it in the context of world history, says it's the new frontier and our future. That book is basically what keeps me going at this job.

But this belief has ramifications: if providing simulated experiences is the most important thing we do, then the game-game-type-game aspect of game development - the point systems, the combos, the rules, the levels, the strategies - is secondary. I think we're seeing the industry start to realize this; GTA3 and Halo represent a gaming future where the simulation (being an unstoppable criminal or being a space marine) is considered more important than the game: I don't know how often people compare their GTA strategies looking for a new insight in how to play the game better; and those giant battles from Halo where you're just one marine among many is not so much a challenge you're trying to win but an experience that thrills you. Metroid Prime, on the other hand, is stuck firmly in the past: with its power ups and color-coded monsters and save-game stations instead of feeling like a space marine you feel like you're playing a game about being a space marine. (If you worked on Metroid Prime, don't hate me: I still thought it was good stuff, definitely got my attention's worth out of it. I just liked Halo better.)

Another ramification of this belief is that those people who only seem to care about good graphics and good audio - those people I've typically snobbishly looked down on as not understanding Games - are on the right track. The graphics and audio are what makes the simulation more immersive, makes it easier to suspend our disbelief, forget that it's just a sim.

And it means that VR, although overhyped in the early nineties, will make a comeback. I think the real reason VR failed as a money-making enterprise back then was the technology just sucked. We were promised that we'd be put in these immersive worlds but we weren't. You'd turn your head and the world would update a half a second later. Give it another decade or two or three. Once the tech is there, it'll be what you want, and if we haven't been burned out already, that's where we'll be working.

Interface or Yummy Candy?


There are some things that we can (almost) all agree belong to the realm of Interface. That is, the experience should be as low-profile as possible because no-one wants to interact with that experience itself. It is just a necessary evil we have to go through in order to get to the thing we actually want (the Yummy Candy).


The process of using the mouse and keyboard in tandem in order to get these words on the web site is a good example. If I could make it so, the process of getting my thoughts to the web site would be instantaneous and invisible to me. The Yummy Candy payoff is having expressed my idea.


If you could perfectly determine on a given project what should be Interface, and what should be Yummy Candy, that would vastly clarify many design decisions. Problem is, people differ even on that most fundamental level.


Playing Age of Empires, I thought that having to micromanage the villagers was Yummy Candy. In my mind, a significant parameter of the game competition was managing one's own attention, and keeping track of everything under pressure. Many others thought this was Interface, and so the sequels featured build cues and more intelligent villager behavior.


An even more extreme case is MOO3, where the design comes close to relegating almost every decision to the Interface category, so that it is possible to win just by clicking the "Next Turn" button over and over. I see what they were trying to do. They wanted people to be able to go after whatever Yummy Candy they each individually wanted to go after, and leave the rest to Interface. Maybe it was just the specifics of implementation that made it fall flat.


Is hitting the piñata just an Interface to the candy inside? For some, yes, and for some, no. Just try your best to assure that you're not making people bang on your Interface over and over before they get any of your game's Yummy Candy to fall out.

Orthogonal Game Elements

A criteria for good game design which seems obvious but is easy to forget in the heat of brainstorming. Fight games forget this all the time, by adding more attacks instead of coming up with ways to multiply the potential of the game. The reason I mention it was I was browsing Ion Storm's web site yesterday and Harvey Smith gave the subject a thorough going over.

The Jamie Test - Step 11

Build Consensus

Going ahead a few steps. Chris's post - which, incidentally, seems to have doubled our readership (Go Chris! I hope your career will survive being blacklisted by Derek Smart) - got me thinking some of the same old thoughts.

I had an English teacher in high school who told us that nothing good ever came out of a committee. This woman also told us that the human body undergoes a weight loss immediately after death -- no doubt the departure of the soul -- and that she was visited by Jesus in her bathroom. Still, she isn't alone in her thoughts; a lot of people look down their noses at 'design by committee.'

I was reading the same post-mortem that Chris read, which talked about the failure of 'design by committee.' I think the wrong lesson is being learned here; much like when you're playing Texas Hold 'Em and you decide not to draw to the inside straight and, lo and behold, the inside straight comes up, and you rebuke yourself, and you say next time I'm going to draw to the inside straight. Wrong lesson. The project in question had a number of problems and 'design by committee' was not what sunk it. This was a project in which a lot of the team members knew the project was in trouble the whole time. If there was any 'design by committee' going on, either these members of the team weren't on those committees, or the committees were not effectively building consensus.

There's a number of ways committees can fail:

Wrong people making the decisions. (Wrong people in the committees.) Frequently you'll have a group of managers as the only ones making decisions and they forget to include the people who are actually going to do the work and know their jobs. So you're handing out job assignments to people who haven't bought in to those assignments in the first place. (I saw this in action with Minority Report. I happened to be in the room when a programmer didn't want to implement a design his boss was suggesting. The boss said, "The consensus is we should do it this way." I said, "It's not consensus if the programmer doesn't agree." "I meant it's the consensus of the leads," the boss said. This was one minor point that surely was not to blame for Minority Report's failure, but if every single aspect of the project was handled that way it could be a problem.) Another possibility, the client (usually the publisher) is not in on the committees either, and will try to control the project retroactively. And finally, people join the team after decisions have already been made; do you rehash all the decisions up to this point? Or do you just shove the old decisions down their throats?

Fear of hurting each other's feelings. At some point, brainstorming has got to end, and hard decisions have to be made, otherwise you will end up with bloatware, as every single person's pet feature is put into the game. It probably is the real problem that the people were complaining about in that post-mortem I mentioned; it's also a problem that we experienced on the team I work on. Our original design document outlined whole systems of features that were tangential to the focus of the game - not quite toasters for cars but headed in that direction. The only thing that got those features cut was that we ran out of time. If we'd been more vigilant in our design, we could have cut sooner, and the resources that did go into those features could have been spent more usefully.

False consensus. Drucker talks about the social experiment where a group of people, in a circle, are asked if two different lines are the same length. Every member of the group but one is a plant; they agree that the different lines are the same. When it gets to the test subject, he almost always caves and agrees with the rest of the group. This phenomenon is what allows a whole group of people to collectively agree on the same bone-headed decision.

Not the best ideas The ideas that go in are not the best ideas but the pet ideas of the most persuasive people. (Often the most persuasive people will be people in lead positions, granted a sort of unconscious bias.) According to Carnegie, persuasion has little to do with the 'rightness' of your argument, and more to do with how you argue.

Nothing gets done Spending eternity in meetings without doing any actual work. When thesis and antithesis compete, it takes a while to come up with synthesis. At the beginning of our latest project we spent half our time in meetings for the first few months. I think the time was well spent but one could argue that we'd have more to show if we just dove in and started making stuff.

That's quite a list, so you may want to switch to The Boss Decides method of making decisions. What this gets you is a trade-off: you're less likely to be bitten by the "fear of hurting other people's feelings" problem and the "nothing gets done" problem, but you're more likely to be bitten by the "false consensus" problem (a bone-headed consensus of one) and the "wrong people making the decisision" problem and the "ideas are not the best ideas but the ideas of the most persuasive." (In this case, the boss.) In my opinion, the fact that you now have someone Responsible running the show, whom you can fire when he fucks up, doesn't really make up for the fact that you've increased the likelihood of fucking up.

My suggestion is this: if you are in a leadership position, take the risk of abandoning yourself to consensus building. (It's hard. There have definitely been times where everybody except me wanted to do one thing and I insisted on another. I now feel that the correct thing for me to do in those cases was keep hashing it out until we achieved synthesis.) If you're not in a leadership position, make yourself heard and try to encourage others on your team to be heard as well.

How do you build consensus? There's a short guide here that I just found via Google. And if you want it spelled out in excruciating detail, and don't mind wacky space cadet stuff, then take a look at the McCarthy's "Decider Protocol" in their Core system here.

These systems solve items 2 through 4, and make some effort to mitigate item 5. What they do not solve is having the wrong people in the meetings. (Our programmer team rapidly achieved consensus when we proposed that we should all get more RAM. There was nobody from budgeting or purchasing in the meeting.) This is a problem I do not yet know how to solve. Must research.

If you still think 'design by committee' is a bad idea, consider this: like Chris said, the Half-Life guys did it. But they took three years to ship, you point out. Well how about this: the Deus Ex guys did it. In my opinion, Deus Ex is the biggest success story in all of recorded videogame development: quality delivered in a timely manner on a reasonable budget. From their post-mortem:

Should you get to name your character or not? A holy war almost broke out on the Deus Ex team about this. "If you can't name your character, it's not an RPG," said some. "If we don't name the character, how do we write and record compelling conversations and create a cool story?" said others. "Story isn't the point…" "Yes, it is…" and on and on and on. We compromised: we gave the player character a code name and back-story but let the player select his real name, which came into play in various ways (though never in speech).

Not a compromise at all, but synthesis. They practice consensus. And so should we.

Chris would say something like, "You're missing my point, Jamie. I never said design by committee was bad, I just said there has to be someone with whom the buck stops." I would argue that since, the world of business being what it is, buck stopping people are built into the system. Whoever your pimp is, they're going to want to know who the "one in charge" is, and that person is going to be considered responsible for the results of the entire team. What concerns me is this unhealthy fascination we have for the org chart. The system wires us to spend a lot more time thinking about who is in charge than we should. Because the system does this to us, and because at some level we like it (who doesn't want to see a nice fat "Technical Director" credit on the game they shipped?) we need to fight this tendency to actually make a true consensus happen. Don't worry about figuring out who is in charge of whom; worry about figuring out how to get the best ideas into your game.

Site Name Change May Be In Order

Saw a movie poster for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen yesterday. They're calling it LXG. LXG??? LXG?!?!?!?! What the fuck? What the fucking fuck? Looks like some marketing suit out there thinks they're making an X-Men thing. I guess after From Hell, I shouldn't be surprised by the butchering of Alan Moore's work. But God! Some people just don't Get It. I say to whoever is making that movie: Good job. You've alienated your hardcore fans and probably the casual moviegoing audience as well.

And now our thirty or so loyal readers will be associating this site with a lame movie instead of a cool comic book.

No Toaster Cars
Know what your game is trying to deliver, and measure everything against how well it helps deliver that thing. If your game is supposed to deliver a visceral feeling of mayhem, don't work on a realistic driving sim. Yes, driving sims are fun. But that's not the game you're making.

Making an appliance that toasts bread is good. But not if you're supposed to be making a car.

No toaster cars.

Conundrums

It seems that every project management platitude out there has its converse out there as well. To wit:

On Offices

People Should Have Their Own Offices

– Steve McConnell

The argument being knowledge workers need long periods of undistracted time in order to accomplish thought-intensive tasks.

People Should All Be In One Big War-Room

The argument being that communication is essential and therefore everyone should be able to always talk to everyone else.

On Scheduling

Optimistic Schedules Are Bad

– Steve McConnell

The argument being that to achieve an overly optimistic schedule you engage in risky and shoddy workmanship, creating a massive bug list that ends up lengthening your schedule beyond what it originally would have been before you got "aggressive."

Optimistic Schedules Are Good

– Steve Maguire, Jim McCarthy

Steve's argument being that tasks take the amount of time allotted for them; to make sure they take as little as possible, create an impossible schedule and rest secure in the knowledge that everyone is getting everything done "as soon as possible."
Jim's argument, from Software For Your Head, is that there are no shortages of resources; only shortages of resourcefulness. I guess we could paraphrase him by saying necessity is the mother of invention.

On Managers Doing Actual Work

The second rule of Bad Management: put yourself in as your own utility infielder

- Tom DeMarco

There are several arguments here: one is management takes time and you should do it. Another is: the people on your team probably know their jobs better than you do, so you shouldn't try to do it for them. Another is: in the role you find yourself in, you're going to be distracted on a regular basis, and therefore not going to be able to focus on doing actual work.

Just Do It or You Pet The Kitty, You Own The Kitty

- Joel Spolsky / Jim McCarthy

I'm paraphrasing here. Joel points out that multitasking is harmful, so if you see a task that needs doing, and everyone on the team is already working on something, it's better to do it yourself than to make somebody task switch. Jim McCarthy says the person who proposes something should implement it, since he's the person who gives a shit.

I'm sure there are more examples of these. In these cases, I think there are solutions where a kind of synergy between both arguments can be developed: for the offices question, we could have a central war room ringed with private offices; "your" computer is in the war-room, but when you need privacy, you can borrow one of the private offices. (I've never heard of anyone actually trying this.) An amusing side note is that on my team we do the exact wrong thing: the people who are actually doing the work are in cubicle farms or share offices, where they get maximum distraction and very little communication, whereas the leads – who should be doing most of the communicating and less actual work – get their own private offices.

And with scheduling, you can use the method from Critical Chain and Slack: schedule deliverables aggressively but have a fat safety buffer at the end of the project. In a way, the industry already does this and calls it 'alpha', although we supposedly do it as a time to fix bugs (which encourages sloppiness, IMO.)

And for that last one, I have no idea. Must think.

Jamie Test, Step 8, Part 2

Let team members estimate their own schedules

More on the scheduling thing: I thought I'd share some of our experiences working with Joel Spolsky's scheduling system.
There are limitations to his system, and while it's still the best thing I've found out there--it beats the crap out of scheduling on filecards, XP style--you have to be aware of the limitations or you can fall into some traps.

- The "Debugging" pad / buffer can allow you to break the system. Supposing I code up a feature. I use up all the hours I've scheduled for it, and it's "done". One problem: it doesn't work yet. So I keep banging my head against it, and log the time as "Debugging." This isn't a problem for the lucky few who write code correctly the first time; people like me, on the other hand, tend to write a collection of bugs, fix the bugs, and then we have software. If we log the 'bug fixing' phase as "Debugging", then we aren't measuring correctly, and the scheduling tool loses its power. The way to fix this is to make sure everybody on the team is aware of this pitfall, and doesn't call a feature 'done' until they've gotten it to the point where there are no stop-shipment bugs that they are aware of.

- The schedule does not explicitly discourage multitasking; you may find that someone is switching from task to task. This could be because different people are asking them to work on different features, or because they just got sick of working on one thing and decided to work on another. Multitasking is bad. Unless truly higher-priority items come up, let people focus on one thing at a time. It's hard to do; everyone wants everything done at once, and they will be constantly asking, "Isn't someone working on this?" and the easy way out is to say, "They are now!" and switch someone.

- People get confused by the whole 8 hour day thing; on our team, we tell them "they aren't hours, they're eighths of days"; on other teams they go to daily. If you spend a half day on something, then you elapse .5 days. A meeting might be .25 or .15.

- Joel says to keep subtasks under 24 hours. In my experience, if you tell your team this, they will frequently underestimate a task (yep, that'll take 24 hours) rather than take the time to subdivide it correctly. (You could argue that we should fix the real problem rather than hack it.) I'm happy with 40 hour granularity; that may be because our schedules tend to project out for almost a year, and we don't need the finer grain.

- How to get everyone to correctly elapse their time every day? If everyone starts on the same day, then they should all have the same number of hours elapsed at the end of every day. So at the end of the day, a manager can run a pivot table that sums everyone's elapsed hours. (Jem Maza found a clever way to automatically pivot into a different spreadsheet.) Then we e-mail that table to the team and people can see who is off. If someone is particularly bad at remembering to elapse, you break out the whip. This is important; the longer you go without remembering to elapse your schedule, the less accurate it gets.

- When someone runs out of time, and someone else still has slack, we'll move tasks across. Because resources aren't fungible, we erase the previous coder's estimate, so it doesn't bias the estimate of the next coder.

- Have a wishlist page in the schedule doc. When the whole schedule is out of slack, it's time to cut features. I cut them from the main page and paste them on the wishlist page. If some time frees up--that very rarely happens--we can move them back. When people come up with new ideas for features, they go onto the wishlist. You can look at the wishlist at the beginning of your next project.

- At certain stages of the project, if we find that someone is consistently under-estimating, we'll go in and pad their remaining estimates. This is usually followed by a spree of reassigning and cutting features.

There are a few arguments against the system: let me address them.

1) "You say this lets me self-manage but it seems more like self-micromanagement to me!"

Micro-management does not mean to manage something in excruciating detail; it means a manager is telling someone else how to do their job. You should be managing in excruciating detail; you should not be telling someone else how to do their job. The scheduling system puts the responsibility for managing the schedule where it belongs: in the hands of the person who knows the most about the problem.

2) "The time I spend scheduling I'm not actually working!"

This isn't really an argument against this system but an argument against scheduling in general. And it's not completely without validity! Scheduling is only useful up to a point, something I talk about here. But for the most part, scheduling is going to be a fact of life, particularly in the production phase of your project, so you might as well use the best system available.

3) "I can't make a decent estimate on how long something is going to take until I've worked on it some."

Scheduling takes time. We admit this. That's why we have a field on the schedule for the act of scheduling itself. If the way you want to schedule is to start working on a task for a little while, until you have enough of a handle on it to make an estimate, that is totally fine. In general, I've found that programmers are surprised at how accurate they turn out to be at the end of the project. In my experience, once estimates are averaged out over a long period of time, everyone comes in between 90% and 150% of their original estimates.

4) "How can I possibly know with that degree of precision how long my tasks are going to take?"

Precision isn't important; sometimes you're over, sometimes you're under; it all comes out in the wash.

5) "How do I know when I'm supposed to work overtime?"

When your boss tells you "have this done by Friday" and it's Thursday and you're not done you know you need to stay late. When your boss is some kind of Mr. Softie who only expects you to deliver half of your tasks early it's not so clear. I believe that some overtime is important; that no matter how good a game you can make in a forty hour work week, you can make a better one in fifty, and marginally better still in sixty.

We work overtime when there's an unavoidable external deliverable due and we're not sure the game's going to be good enough by then. So we're crunching right now (50-60 hour weeks) for E3, because we're not Sure.

Another reason to crunch is when our bug find rate is higher than our bug fix rate; during this period of time, we're losing ground, and the only way to make it up is with good old overtime.

6) "It doesn't handle dependencies!"

This is the big one, and we've definitely been bitten by it: a version is due, and it's supposed to have feature X, and there's plenty of time for each person working on feature X to get the subtasks done, but the subtasks have to be done in order. Personally, *I* don't care: I'm happy with: when person A gets to their part of feature X, and they discover they're dependent on Person B, we make feature X the highest priority for Person B, and let person A move on to feature Y. Feature X doesn't make it into the rev, and we live with it. It's my belief that, over the cycle of the entire project, the effects of these dependency chains disappear, because these dependency chains are under a month or so: mission requires character which requires animations which require model, for example. As long as we prioritize these things correctly, and push them through the factory, they'll get done before alpha. Of course, the people who evaluate your milestone deliverables may not be as casual about it as I am.

Alexander Jhin has had some second thoughts about his article on the coolness of using behavioral psych in game design. He used to think it was cool, now he thinks it denies the possibility of art in games. I'm not so sure, and I posted this in response. If there's anybody out there who actually reads all my posts, you'll see a lot of repetition here:

Behavioral psychology has the luddites imagining *Clockwork Orange* and pigeons pecking at levers but it was my favorite subject back when I got my psych degree. As I was graduating in 1991 there was a semi-new movement afoot to stop thinking of behavioral psych in terms of manipulation but in terms of communication. The pigeon isn't pecking at the lever because it knows it will get food; the pigeon is pecking at the lever to communicate with the researcher that it would like some food now, please. Or, the researcher is communicating with the pigeon - "Let me know when you want food by pecking this lever, ok?"

Games may be one of the only media that can use this avenue of communication. Will Wright could have written a book where he might say, "Debt is poisonous to a municipal government because of such-and-such." Instead we have this game where he shows us what debt does by punishing us for using it. (I've learned a bunch of other lessons from Will, such as "Nuclear energy is safe and efficient" and "Always hire a maid". I'm not saying what he's communicating is right, I'm just saying it's a unique, engaging way to get communication across. If he had written that hypothetical book...I never would have read it.)

Another way in which we communicate is to guide the player into having the experience we want them to have. Zelda's pieces-of-heart rewards exploring and puzzle-solving, for example. Tony Hawk rewards busting mad tricks and getting huge air. We must be extremely careful with this technique, as what we consider a reinforcer may actually not be, like in the famous experiment where kids were rewarded for drawing and the next day ceased their creative activities. I did not explore much in the latest Zelda.

Which brings me to a final point; behavioral psych, at its origin, is simply this: watch behavior; change stimuli; watch behavior again. Which is what all game designers should be doing: watching people play the game, changing the game, and repeating the process. (Until you run out of time and have to ship.)

So, while I agree that using these techniques to make a game addictive may be bad game design--my wife has finally overcome her Animal Crossing habit, thank God, I thought I was going to need to arrange an intervention--let's not throw them out altogether. You wrote a good, useful article.

Warren Spector's speech, what Greg Costikyan calls the "Don't worry be happy" speech, is available at Gamasutra. I, myself, liked it, but hey - I'm working on a sequel *and* a license. We're taking some fairly big risks this time around (last time around just trying to port an engine to three consoles and make some original content in eighteen months seemed like risk enough) and I'm scared as hell but Warren says that's a good thing. Maybe tomorrow I'll worry less and happy more.

Jamie Test, Step 8

Let team members estimate their own schedules

I really don't have much to say about this that Joel Spolsky and Erik Bethke and Steve McConnell didn't already cover.

I have a friend who has a friend who is working on a high-profile game who is afraid that they don't have enough programmer bandwidth to complete their feature set. I say to that friend: "A Hobbit Can Contend With The Will of Sauron." If you are at a company where they do not ask you to estimate your own schedule -- and in my opinion even asking something like "Do you think you can get this done by Friday?" counts as not asking, because programmers are notoriously underconfident in their estimating abilities and would rather pass the responsibility upstream -- then find some time, either on a weekend or when the boss is not looking, to write down a list of everything you have to do before you ship, and estimate how long each thing is going to take. Then add the various buffers Joel suggests in his article. (25% debugging, 10% unplanned features, etc.) Then compare your results to your project's "alpha" or "feature complete" date. You will probably find you're Not Going To Make It. Take those findings to your lead and ask to have features transferred from you to the other programmers. Recommend that you have the other programmers do the same thing, to make sure that they're going to make it. You will probably find that none of you are Going To Make It. At that point, reccomend that they ask their publisher for a) More Money, b) More Time, c) Less Features, or d) some combination of the above.

Your lead won't want to hear it. He may say something like, "How do *you* know this is how long it will take?" He may say something like, "I think you're just lazy!" Remember your people skills. Say things like "I'm concerned about the accuracy of our schedule" rather than "This is fucking bullshit!" (I'm not very good about this, myself. But I try to save the bullshit-calls for emergencies.) How you handle this conversation could mean the difference between saving the project and ruining it. If he's a Good Lead, he won't kill the messenger, and will take your advice, and possibly save the project. (Peter Drucker says good leaders are secure enough in their leadership that they foster disagreement among their 'followers'.) If he's a Bad Lead...then I don't know what to do next. Maybe you can go over his head, or maybe your team has a way you can give feedback anonymously.

I've never been in this exact situation myself. I have been in the situation where I was handed a project--I was the only programmer--and the first thing I did was come up with estimates and it turned out we didn't have enough time. I immediately told the producer, who happened to be a good friend of mine who got me the job in the first place. He asked me if I'd be willing to put in overtime and I said no. They accepted that and threw more money at the project. Later, when an unplanned feature cropped up, and the code I'd have to be dealing with was cryptic stuff from another dimension, I flatly refused to add the feature. The boss himself came by and asked me if I'd reconsider. Here I was more stubborn than I should have been: I didn't even give them an estimate. I said it was impossible. Honestly, given some amount of time, I could have solved the problem, and once I told them that amount, they probably would have agreed that the bang wasn't worth the buck. On another project with the same producer, we were in the last few weeks and I realized we weren't going to make it. They found another programmer and together we managed to break Brooks's Law and finish on time. And there have definitely been times were it seemed like upper management was trying to push my team around and I pushed back. (Probably could have handled those times better.)

The thing is, times were different then. Game programmers were in short supply or high demand, I'm not sure which. I didn't have to worry about finding another job. If I had to (and it never did come to that) I could have voted with my feet. These days, with the major publishers' ubiquitous mantra of "fewer better games" it may be tough to land that next job. So don't be as reckless as I would have been. Make a sincere effort to institute change, don't flip out, and, if your effort fails, send out your resume. (But be careful about it. There's only a few degrees of separation in our industry. There's a good chance that the person you send your resume to is friends with someone on your team! And your headhunter does not care! Very few people at Treyarch send out their resume without me finding out about it.)

A hobbit can contend with the will of Sauron.

Jamie Test, Step 7

Fix Bugs Before Writing New Code

This is the central theme of Steve Maguire's *Debugging the Development Process*, the first book on project management that I ever read. You never forget your first book on project management. It is also straight off The Joel Test. Go there if you want to find out why you should fix bugs first.

I'm here to tell you, in the games industry, most people don't seem to know this. There's a misconception that alpha is the time we fix bugs; up until then we write features, allow a few bugs to get in, and when we hit alpha we fix them all. You'll hear various specious logic about why to skimp on the bug-fixing, such as, "If I take time to fix the bugs, I won't get this feature done on time," and "There's always more bugs! If we tried to fix them all, we'd never be able to write any features!" This is complicated by upper management wanting to see visible progress all the time; they notice when you get the lens flare in, but they don't notice when those fall-out-of-the-world bugs stop happening.

But blaming upper management is too easy. The real problem is us; we hate finding and fixing bugs. We'd rather stick needles in our eyes. It drains the life out of us. It's Sisyphean; every time we fix a bug, two new ones seem to show up on our lists. So we're all too happy to agree when a manager says, "We need to get the minke in there by Friday," because that means we can stop trying to find whatever damn bug we're supposed to be finding, and actually write some new code.

The problem is further complicated by the general pattern which we do things: we code a feature, we check it in, we start on a new feature. While working on the new feature, bugs get reported about our last feature. So we've already broken the "Don't write new code before fixing bugs" rule.

So: how do we do it? How do we change our team so that we fix bugs first?

For what it's worth, here's my advice. Take this advice with a grain of salt, because my team is far from exemplary when it comes to getting those bugs fixed. With our last project, we found at least six thousand bugs (eighteen thousand if you count duplicates) during the alpha phase. That's six thousand bugs that probably should have been found and fixed sooner.)

1) Be flexible in your scheduling. Joel's scheduling system has flexibility built into it. Milestone schedules do not. If you do milestones, then an important criteria for a succesful milestone should be no bugs. It's well-nigh impossible to do zero defect milestones on a monthly basis, IMO; Microsoft's Visual C++ team did them quarterly. Schedule at least 25% of your time for bug fixing. Slip features on milestones rather than slipping bugs. If management pushes you around for not meeting targets, push back.

2) Track bugs from the beginning of the project. Don't wait for it to go into testing. This seems brain-dead obvious to me but a lot of teams don't do it.

3) Have testers from the beginning of the project. If you don't have testers, do the testing yourself. Set up a system where anybody on the team can submit a bug. Schedule time to do testing.

4) You still need to perform triage on your bugs. (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000014.html) If you fix every problem everybody has with every feature, it is true; that feature will never be finished. Somebody has to ask themselves: "Could we ship this bug in the box if we had to?" If the answer is yes, the bug goes on the low-priority list, where it doesn't get fixed until alpha. Which means a lot of cosmetic bugs - or graphical glitches - or game design flaws - are high priority bugs that must be fixed when they come up, unless you're willing to ship them.

5) Make sure everyone on the team understands that if they have bugs on their list, they are supposed to stop what they're working on and work on those bugs. This will not make them happy. The knowledge that they're increasing the likelihood of shipping on time is little consolation.

6) Make your asserts fatal. The team will come to a grinding halt when a bug is introduced. Believe it or not, this is a good thing, because people fix their bugs in a hurry when others are waiting on them.

One thing we've tried that Does Not Work is code reviews or inspections. "What?" you say. "But in *Rapid Development*, Steve McConnell said they were the cooler than unit tests! You must have done them wrong!" Honestly; we did it by the book. We read both Glib and Weinberg and instituted a formal policy. We counted the number of stop-shipment bugs we found. By our estimates, the time we spent doing the inspections was greater than the time we would have saved fixing those bugs later, when they popped up. (Although we were counting just coder time when making the estimation. The cost of bugs to producers and testing may have made inspections worth it.) It is my feeling that inspections were something that was more useful when languages and compilers were more prone to letting bugs get through; now that we have automated warning messages and higher level constructs and asserts and the like, inspections don't catch that much. Inspections are also good for enforcing coding standards, if you really care about that kind of thing. I'll say this about inspections; although they didn't help they didn't hurt. The main reason we don't do them anymore is because we didn't get processes in place to make them more automatic.

You might ask, "Once we're fixing our bugs first, why bother having an alpha at all? Why not just add zero-defect features all the way up to our final ship date?"

I found on my last project that even with ruthless fixing-of-bugs-first, even with in-house testing, we still had more bugs than we could handle post-alpha. But supposing the system worked as intended, and you hit alpha with no high-priority bugs. Then you're a big fat winner. You can now spend the next few months fixing low-priority bugs, polishing gameplay, even introducing low-impact features, and acheiving a level of quality rarely seen in the videogame world.

Of course, if anybody has more ideas on how to keep the bugs down, I'd love to hear them.

We take videogames seriously

We just pooled our money to have Chad Proctor drink a cup of "Special Garlic Sauce." He didn't throw up. These things happen during E3 crunch.

We've been playing a lot of Universalis lately. No, it's not a computer game. But I've had a hell of a lot more fun playing it than I have had playing computer games lately. I'm becoming addicted, in fact. It sounded like a dumb idea when I first heard about it; "You tell a story together?" I assumed it was bound to end up with results like this. It turns out that the game provides enough structure to usually prevent that from happening. (We've played half a dozen times now and only once did the story completely derail. And we still had a good time.) And as long as there are enough people playing with enough ideas to keep things rolling...(five seems like enough; four is pushing it)...it's great stuff. It's the Karaoke of storytelling; the narratives we've produced would probably be pretty painful for anyone else to hear, but the enjoyment we got producing them was much greater than the enjoyment we'd typically get from being on the receiving end of mass market narratives. (I admit it. I like Karaoke. I used to think I was too cool for it, but I'm getting old.)

I've written a few reviews on game design/development books here. I covered Erik Bethke, Richard Rouse III, and Roger Pederson.

God damn

Would somebody other than me post to this thing? It's easy. Pretend you're writing e-mail to nobody.

Added some more to the Game Design Wiki. http://www.ludism.org/gamedesign/SaveGamePatterns. To quote Justin Love, the founder: "Yah! A second person ;^) (I was kind of hearing crickets myself)"

Hey! I fixed the archives! I'm not sure how!

Think I'll play some Kohan.

I asked Noah Falstein how I could contribute to the 400 project and he said to e-mail him. Naturally that was dissatisfying. I wanted to see my contributions, rather than feel like they were sucked up into some void. It occurred to me a wiki was the answer. Maybe I should start one, I thought. I tried starting one at Treyarch, and after a small burst of activity...crickets. Maybe I should start one on the internet, I thought. Maybe there's already one there. I did a search. There was. Coolness. A little rough so far, and intended more for board games than computer games, but with a little love... I've already started contributing.

More notes on Zelda

You know, as frustrating as Mask of Majora was for me, it did what Wind Waker failed to do, which was take gameplay in an innovative new direction. The holistic groundhog day design of it, where you have to keep time-travelling back to the beginning of the cycle, with new knowledge and new abilities, was really quite genius, although it was frustrating as hell when you were only halfway through a dungeon and time ran out.

I was pissed that Mask of Majora only had four dungeons, though. For me, Zelda is all about the dungeons. But I guess it isn't for everyone else. Which may point out a problem with the whole Zelda line: does it have a focus? Could you pin Shigeru Miyamoto down and ask him, "In one paragraph, what is Zelda?" Just a thought.

Notes on Zelda: The Wind Waker

Normally I try to objectively study game design with these "notes on" articles, but I don't know if I'll be able to pull that off this time. I don't know if it's because I'm getting old, because my expectations are too high, what, but I found the new Zelda to be disappointing. There was a little of the sense of wonder and awe that I got playing Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time (which I took notes on here), but certainly not as much. It was less difficult; I consulted gamefaqs three times, and two of those times I should have figured it out myself; and although I was pleased that it wasn't frustrating I felt a growing sense of dissatisfaction at the ease of the puzzles. The "Zelda moment", those moments where the answer to the puzzle becomes clear, were not giving me the same joy they usually did, I think because most of the puzzles I had either seen before in previous Zeldas, or were too easy. The insanely complex water dungeon of Ocarina required me to go to gamefaqs twice, but I enjoyed myself, damnit. That reminds me of something Meretzky said in Richard Rouse's book: he argued that it's better to be too hard than too easy, because people can always look up hints if it's too hard (which should be even more true now than it was back then, with gamefaqs) but they have no recourse if it's too easy. But it seems like since the beginning of time, game developers have been going the opposite direction, trying to make the games easier and easier to alienate fewer people. They run the risk of alienating the hardcore gamers, which some would say is a bad idea, arguing that the hardcore gamers are the hubs who spread word of mouth, but I don't know what evidence there is that the hardcore (early adopters) tend to be the same people as the hubs (those with lots of friends/acquaintances).

An additional design flaw that jumps out at me immediately: a lot of the game is sailing. This violates Mark Nau's "terrain is important" rule, and despite the various things they put in the water to try to make sailing interesting it was ultimately a failure. Beautiful and breathtaking for a few minutes; dull for the rest of the game. A world of rivers running through canyons with waterfalls, jumps, and caves seems like it would be obviously more fun, to me. The sailing is technologically impressive; a seamless, continuous ocean dotted with islands. This may be an example of the advances in technology creating more opportunities for boring games. A treasure-hunting mode that essentially boiled down to Fed Ex missions did not save it.

The sailing is tied in with the narrative which is the strongest of a Zelda game yet. The island world reminds me of Wizard of Earthsea; the story of Zelda and the Hero of Time returning in successive incarnations reminds me of Moorcock's Eternal Champion. The narrative had a weight to it that I don't think I've seen in another game, giving my actions a certain heroic something; I almost felt as if what I did meant in the game world meant something. (Somewhere I saw an article discussing Joseph Conrad and Link to the Past but I can't find it now. It must be relevant, somehow.)
So what, besides sailing, was added to the new Zelda?

The two game elements that I had not seen in a previous Zelda were the Grappling Hook and the Song-Of-Command. The first was a third person version of the grappling hook from Metroid; the song-of-command allowed you to control an ally in the dungeons, and that was the one thing that really opened up some new puzzle possibilities: your ally had a different set of attributes then you did, and you would have to use your powers and their powers in concert to advance. I just wished there was more of it.

Combat was much more engaging than the previous Zelda. They added a new 'parry' move that you could only use if you weren't blocking; I found myself abandoning my strategy of keeping my shield up, because I wanted to get those tasty double-damage parries in. Some of the enemies were resistant to most attacks except for the parries. Some of their attacks could be parried and some of them couldn't, so I would have to watch closely, guard down, to see what kind of attack was coming and either parry, block, or get out of the way depending on the move. Simple but effective. Not very deep (I didn't get much better at it by the end of the game than I was in the beginning) but engaging. Also, the previous Zelda would rarely have more than one enemy attack you at the same time. The enemies would mob you in this Zelda, and you would have to jockey for position to not get hit. (And sometimes you could encourage them to strike each other. Good fun.) (And the bosses are less silly than the last couple games.)

In my article on Ocarina I wrote that I didn't understand why they actually made you play the Ocarina. That was the intellectual gamer in me talking. I'm reversing myself. Fact is, actually getting to play the instrument (it's a baton in Wind Waker) is toyetic. (Toyetic means "like a toy" and it's a good thing.)

The illusion of nonlinearity: there was a moment in the new Zelda where it seemed like you could choose which of two dungeons you would get to explore next. It was so convincing I saw a note on Gamefaqs say "You can do these in any order." It is not true; a key NPC is not available until you've completed the first dungeon. I felt slightly betrayed; I have no problem with controlling the line which the player takes through the game world, but to open up two dungeons, implying that you can do either, when you can't...it's like..."psyche! For a second there you thought you weren't on a rail!"

One last thing: since Ocarina had a hold-the-button-down camera lock on and Majora had a toggled camera lock I was really interested in seeing what Nintendo finally went with for Wind Waker. The answer is they didn't: it's configurable in the options menu. That's right, Nintendo caved and for the first time I can think of, let the player decide instead of actually making a choice. For a rant on options menu that may or may not apply to game development, look here.