Fallout Creator Explains Why Modern Games Suck
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- čas přidán 27. 09. 2023
- Timothy Cain, the creator of Fallout (1997), explains the problem with modern video games and video game journalism.
by @CainOnGames • Game Development Caution
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Channel Editors: Cat͏͏Dany & Daily Dose of A͏sm͏o͏ng͏͏old
If you own the copy͏͏right of content sh͏͏owed in this vide͏͏o and would like it to be r͏͏͏emoved:
/ catdanyru - Hry
Game developers used to be gamers. They aren't anymore.
@smerchh915 gay mers rise up
Eh, I think its the opposite, there's a certain personality that is good at creating content, and if you're like me, my content most likely wouldn't sell
so I think there's no good creators
that's because the companies hiring devs wants mindless sheep who follow orders instead of creatives. half of the devs in the larger studios are outsourced
it used to be like 30 people making it, not 3000.
It was literally Interplay's motto by gamers for gamers
As a software dev, it's shocking how many devs have no idea what they are doing.
But why, bad management?
@@MGrey-qb5xz
1.bad system can reword the incompetant people for doing bad job and make competant people stop trying
2. Toxic work place culture can push people away and more often that not people who remain are a bunch of incompetant fucks.
@@MGrey-qb5xz and no trust in management, if you fear to get fired if you produce errors or fail, it's just natural not to risk anything
As a software dev, it's shocking how many devs have no idea what they are doing.
Bad hiring practices.
They often get the cheapest people, not the best.
I'm working in software dev and I'm frequently baffled by how people with 20+ years of programming experience can still fail trivial tasks
I worked in 2 video game studios:
1) studio A - excellent simple games, very good generalist programmers who played and loved games
2) studio B - very good AAA games, excellent programmers, most of which never played video games
I stayed 5 1/2 years at Studio A and loved every minute.
I stayed only 3 months at Studio B and soon left.
If you want to do great things, set objectives, make a plan and do it with like minded people.
Great teams with great ideas make great projects.
A game builder is just like a housebuilder. They purposely take as long as they can so they can get paid as much as they can before the project is over. I mean ask anyone who’s had a house built for them the builder will tell them three months at the beginning and then after three months comes, he’ll add another two months and then another two months and he’ll just keep dragging it out because every single month he’s on the books he’s getting paid and he’d rather drag the job out do half assed work, make up fake excuses so that he can keep getting paid a steady paycheck rather than do his best job as fast as he could so he can knock it out and start another job. That’s exactly why these types of people need to be put on a yearly paycheck no matter what and they should not be getting paid by the job, they should be getting paid a base salary every year so that there’s no incentive to go slow.
I was at #1 except the very good generalists programmers that didnt play games and Ive been at the second one where the AAA programmers did play games
Its not about the playing or not playing games.
And similarly, stayed at #1 as long as I could, and left the second quickly
@@nancypotts9877
As someone who has worked in the "House building" industry its usually a company taking as many contract jobs as possible and then send the least amount of workers as possible to finish those jobs. Add to that massive overtime and terrible working conditions and bosses, constant missing of crucial building Material, and staff that gets not trained because they say that those workers might start their own companys and Take away contract work from them. All of that causes badly built expensive houses that take ages to built.
The only one who wins is the boss of the building company who keeps bragging unironicaly that he started building his third house now in italy and tries to convince you that overworking clearly is worth it with your minimum wage job.
And all of that is the norm and not extreme cases.
ha! I KNEW they were CRAWP! if you know your stuff, it shouldn't be THAT bad!
Honestly alot of my fav games are from smaller or indie devs now, this helps me further understand why
*a lot
Most of my favorite games are now indie games. The best ones have more intriguing mechanics, better story, or a more polished experience than AAA games.
The difference between a dev who WANTS to be working on a project and a dev who is there for cash is absolutely massive.
@@daisy9181 stay strong dude
@@daisy9181 FUCKING FACTS
@@daisy9181 sooo right on so many levels, currently doing my last year at university doing a Bsc in game development programming. I could have done a degree in comp sci, economics, accounting or anything else but i decided to do game dev because i've always wanted to be a part of something that will bring joy to people around the world; money is secondary. My degree is mostly group based with us being split into groups of 8-12 people as to try and replicate what a small development team will be. The amount of people the last 2 years that have just done minimum effort, won't meet up because of anxiety and make out they've had the hardest lives is unbelievable. They have a complete lack of social and employability skills and just seem to be at uni just for the sake of it. I have worked almost every week since i was 14, ive worked in teams in sales, wedding catering, bars, and the odd freelance job just to build up employability skills as i know the industry i want to join is competitive and i want every advantage i can get, most the people on my course have never even had a job and seem to take uni just as seriously as secondary school (highschool). I just hope the work i've put in will be enough to land me a job once i graduate.
They are all there for cash. 😂
There's a reason you don't see volunteer game development studios cropping up like you have volunteer fire fighters.
But yes, certainly, there's going to be a lot of workers who feel disenfranchised or disillusioned with their situation and it's going to impact their performance. When we have a culture of crunch, mandatory OT, brutal deadlines etc. what we're doing is treating workers like shit and telling them we don't respect them as human people. Even if they're paid handsomely, crunch and OT still fucks a person up. That's going to result in a labor base that resents management, and to some degree resents the projects themselves. I feel like a significant part of the reason we see so many buggy games launching these days is that the devs are pushed to a point of "Okay, whatever, fuck this, fuck you, here take it and let me sleep".
We need labor unions to maintain a healthy relationship between management and labor. Without them the product is going to suffer, invariably. You're right people need to have passion for their work, and despite anti labor propaganda you've probably been fed (by asmon himself in the past even), unionized workers do actually perform better, because it's easier for them to love their job when their job isn't trying to consume their soul.
I mean being entirely fair like... Everything involved in games development especially to be hired by a AAA studio requires a VERY high level of skill, and you aren't always going to end up getting hired specifically for games you WANT to work on. You may not care about making the cloth folds prettier in the latest NBA 2K game or making the horse brushing minigame in Barbie Horse Adventure but your rent/house payment and bills are due at the end of the month and you have to keep the lights on and food in the fridge somehow.
Quickest way to destroy a game company, become a publicly traded business. You start having to please the shareholders by always showing money coming in.
this pretty much always kills the soul of any company.
From then on the only thing that matters is profit without compromise
@@HoneyBadgerVideosthis is because it is literally illegal to not make a profit when you are traded publicly, you don't make a profit you are breaking a law
@@Reefizerno it's not
@@cqpzg He's misunderstanding "fiduciary duty."
@@Reefizeryou break the law when you promise something you can’t produce and trade money for something you never could have done
Tim Cain is a master of the craft. I could listen to him speak for hours. I'm not in the industry, but I'd love to have this guy for a boss or colleague.
I started working for a very large company once (came in as a senior developer) and was handed a program (a very SIMPLE one) to do a change to it.
The program had about 2000 LOC (lines of code). Blew my mind.
I asked the senior developer, "Who wrote this?" "He doesn't work here any more."
"Good. Because this program should be about 100 LOC." We kind of got in an argument because he didn't want me to re-write it.
"It took that guy a month to write that program. Don't touch it!"
By the end of that day, I handed him a new program, with his changes in it... in about 100 LOC.
Within my first year there I had re-written every program that joker wrote. LMAO
As a former QA tester, it annoyed the hell out of me that certain pieces of the code base were unnecessarily large and seemed to have no standards whatsoever.
If it can be more concise, make it so - if for no other reason than eliminating potential failure points off the top.
@@RighteousJ Don't make it *too* concise, because overly concise and "clever" can win you code golf contests, but will never be readable. How to tell one from the other is what experience brings.
Love ya bud, keep it up.
I don't know much about programming, but I know that if I was making that big of a mistake, I would want to be show how to make it concise and better.
@@MrBuns-yi2hk you'd think.
“Why does it take 4 weeks?”
Destiny developer - “I don’t even have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain”
"And yet you want 4 weeks for what should take a few hours."
😂 so accurate
@@WorldWalker128it's usually along the lines of it only takes a few hours to fix this and this but it breaks a list of 45 things which take for granted the behavior being fixed.
@@ImperialFoolThis is true, I don't know if it was for this bit of code the guy is talking about. But often there are a lot of interconnected parts and by adding something it requires making adjustments in other areas. It's best practice to build in such a way that you minimize these dependencies. But that itself takes time to plan out the implementations properly. If you do it well it makes adding code and making changes pretty fast. You do it poorly and adding or changing things quickly becomes rather nightmarish as the codebase grows and grows.
@@ImperialFool Another non-rare scenario: function X had a bug and function Y, using X, worked around that bug by adjusting what X returned. If you fix X, of course you need to fix Y, but you don't know that, not before the unit tests of Y crap out after fixing X. Assuming there are unit tests.
as a Dev, it blows my mind how much a small indie team can accomplish with less funding and manpower. There's no excuse really
What have you developed?
@@PanCotzky currently working on a SCI-FI FPS called “Sifera” but other than that I’ve developed several dozen indie games as a freelancer. I’m not in the AAA scene at all
Because it's concentrated talent. 10 very good Devs can perform much more then 1000 bad devs.
Coding in general is a very weird thing. If you are interested in your craft and have some level of ownership of your code, it feels amazing to beat every challenge that appears and you feel angry at your stupid biology for requiring sleep and rest, like why can't i just keep learning and doing this interesting stuff? But if you don't feel like you have any ownership of the code, and you're just doing some Work Item that got assigned to you, and you don't even know exactly how that will fit in the greater scale of the project, it feels like torture to do 8h/day on something like that. I'd say my productivity is something close to 10% on the latter scenario compared to the former.
passion
Estimate padding is very much an unintended consequence of KPI driven production. KPIs are supposed to be used to indicate that there is a failure or bottleneck, which then needs to be fixed. Eventually, this often becomes not about fixing the root of the problem but about meeting the metrics. Therefore, people engage in estimate padding: treating the symptom rather than the disease.
My hubby works for a small game dev company down here in South Africa and I showed him the first few minutes of this.
He is absolutely flabbergasted at the fact that either the ToDo lists or the small coding segment would raise any concerns even with the small dev team like the one he works with.
I imagine because it gets “real” in South Africa and the people are tougher and not coddled like the West.
@@ystconnectionRight, so I'm a dev in the west.
Task lists and taking responsibility for the implementation of a feature is an industry standard.
I don't know what kind of kindergarten Timothy Cain works at.
@@P4INKillers As a tradesman, i look at that as a blueprint. They are standard anywhere you go. However what is not standard, is setting unrealistic deadlines and using bunk product (or code bases) to build your foundation and then bitching when it falls apart. No insult intended towards you on the last remark, thats mean't for the shitty bosses who don't know shit and think they are experts even though they are hiring cause they can't do it.
@@ystconnection Ah, that must be why all the best software comes out of SA. When they have electricity that is.
@@domerame5913 Well, the able once go to USA, like that guy who established multiple billions worth companies
I think this is a very good example of what's happening across the entire workforce.
I see so many people refuse to accept blame or point fingers, and all because the second they do they're fired or don't get a raise.
No one's encouraged to make mistakes anymore.
People have to make mistakes. It's how we improve.
There's another video on Tim's channel where he talks about exactly this. There was a super bad crash bug in Fallout 1 that took a couple of weeks to find just before launch. After they found and fixed it the management (i.e. Brian Fargo) wanted to know who was responsible, but Tim refused to tell him because he knew the poor guy would probably get fired. As punishment for not ratting out someone who made a simple mistake Tim didn't receive his bonus for the game.
Exactly
Making video games isn't brain surgery. It shouldnt take 7 years to make a video game 😂😂😂😂😂
@@kennypowerz1267 If a brain surgery takes 7 years something is seriously wrong.
It's the corporate boss management style at fault. They don't fire people that should obviously be fired because they limp in and suck up, and the people that accept blame, focus on accountability, and strive for true excellence rock the boat. Never underestimate people that have made a career out of looking busy, sucking up, and aren't present when real decisions need to be made and accountability is taken. Also important never to underestimate a manager's laziness.
As a software dev (NOT game dev) I can tell you that your program is only as modular and easy to work with it if it was designed from the ground up properly. This "all inventory load" BS is bad coding plan and simple. They were given the option to do it the right way or the fast/cheap way and they chose cheap and shitty.
So abandoning your in-house game engines with unreal 5 would be bad right?
tech debt
Basic triple constraint problem. Fast, cheap, or good. Pick two.
That's the problem when some stakeholders suddenly say "I want this". The architects discuss about it for a long time and then some poor fella has to code it. It is really rare that something is planned from start to finish
Totally agree. I deal with this daily. New projects going to production without the required investigation and planning end up being messy and people work (do code) without knowing all the details of the feature they are implementing. You end up with a coding mess and bad optimized systems.
As a artist that works on small projects with people, and I can confirm that both scenarios are true:
Sometime I to a job that at start is very exciting, but then you need to go over layers of different people that needs to evaluate the job done making things take longer than the expected to be done, and sometimes leading to having the same work redone again and again until it pleases everyone.
And then there are jobs were people just expect you to know exactly what to do but the truth is that I have to do a lot of research delaying the job a lot. I can call it a incompetence of myself, but its art, I am learning everyday and I do not mastered every style or get every idea ever made.
As a senior software dev, my team has a solid two months of work.
I fixed a one-liner bug, but it snowballed into four more "quick favors."
Giving an inch turned into a mile. ETA: 4 weeks.
I think part of the problem is people start their career eager to work and they'll get a lot done... But then they start to get continuously burned by bad managers. I've seen so many bright eyed hard charging people get completely destroyed by toxic management and then they turn into those ultra cautious people who want lots of time and everything documented and signed off on because they feel it's the only way to protect themselves and their career from management.
100% how this shit works.
@@KonradGM Not to mention the fact that managers often feel threatened by up and coming people and will start targeting the competition with beurocracy to stagnate or kill their career.
Realest take in the comments. I've done business studies (have the knowledge base and skill set to set up & run a company) and the average manager in 8/10 companies SHOULDN'T be a manager because they don't have the skill- and mindset for it.
To add what you said, in many cases, managers don't even have a clue about how technical things work, they only know about creating projects and following protocols. So managers don't understand how app/game development actually works. I know this because I'm actually being taught to simplify very technical concepts so that upper management can understand it lol
Hmm
As a solo dev, I watch this guy every day. His talks are always interesting and inspirational. Glad to see him getting some publicity here.
I have found a lot of his videos worthwhile, enternaining and informative.
During working time in between meetings right ?
Maybe I missed something but the whole part about developers being like "i won't accept having my name marked next to a task when i'm working on it" made absolutely no sense to me. It's not even about accountability like Asmon was trying to say, simpler than that it's basic visibility and tracking. Working on a team where there is no indicator of who is working on what is like... what? twilight zone stuff.
Hell yeah! Do you have any games we can play now?
Not yet unfortunately.. I'm 1 year into development, systems are almost complete and then I need to add enough content to show off. I'll set a reminder to comment here when I have something you guys can look at :)@@DioxideCad
I can explain why even the simplest thing is measured in weeks rather than days.
1. Writing the code probably takes a few hours of work at most.
2. Before writing it, you need to understand the spaghetti of paths that lead to and from this code. This can take a day of study.
3. Then you need to write tests. This should take a few hours of work, unless the feature is more complicated and wider tests are required.
4. Then you need to get code review approval. This can last a day or two, but may require a few more hours of work to handle critique.
5. Then you need to deploy the code. This is typically automated by a system that deploys the code progressively from non-production stages to production stages, with automated tests that run the code and check that it works in specific wats, and passive tests that observe metrics about the code to ensure it isn't broken in nonspecific ways. This takes little work but lasts like 2 days to a week.
At the end of it all, the simplest code takes about a week or more to get out.
This completely omits any confounding events that might happen that nobody can predict:
1. That place in the code doesn't have some data you need? Add another few days while you snake it in through the spaghetti
2. Code designed wrong, so your feature is impossible? Now you need to debate a refactor with tech leads. Add a couple weeks.
3. Some stupid dependency (other code or system you rely on) can't be included? Add a few days hammering on the build system.
4. Code unexpectedly fails on deployment tests or metrics? Add a few days investigating and a few more fixing it.
5. Manager decides the feature needs to be different? Restart from zero.
as an indie developer this is very entertaning the first fallout game was also great game remember playing it with my brother in my teen years
As an engineer I loved that conversation between Scotty and Jordy in engineering where Captain Pickard asks Jordy for a time estimate over coms and Jordy tells the captain 1 hour. Then Scotty asks Jordy how long it will really take and Jordy says 1 hour and Scotty is like, "Dont tell your captain how long it will really take! Tell him 4 hours and when you finish it in an hour you will look like a genius!"
Jordy was a professional and on point.
One of my favorite scenes in TV history.
Always be a Geordi LaForge.
Geordi LaForge didn't work for modern corporate management where venture capitalists run everything@@Mahoney20x6
Ha - I just looked up the clip, and it's incredible! Now, I understand wanting to give yourself a little buffer room regarding deadlines. Asking for a month to code something that *should* take a couple hours is pushing it, but having little wiggle room is nice for life's unplanned b.s. (or Scotty pulling out the crystals and asking questions!).
@@ProfessorPolymer In my experience, something always, _always_ happens that extends the timeline. And the majority of the time it's something external or completely impossible to have planned for. (Scotty might have been overdoing it a little lol)
I’ve been a dev for 30+ years. Although I’m not in the gaming industry, I’ve seen the same trend. That said, I must admit my generation had it easy: we used to work at a really low level. Not that many bloated frameworks on which to write our code. Working much closer to the metal allowed us to deal with much less variables. We had much more control. We were also much more “code before, ask questions later”, and that’s probably a big no no today. We worked a lot, but it was passion driven, rarely imposed by management.
Nowadays we have some overly intrusive frameworks that make simple code difficult
I've been a programmer for the last 10 years. Writing new code, especially at lower levels, is usually easier to estimate, and I understand that 20-30 years ago we've had less complex projects with a lot more new code. Today you take some bloated piece of garbage and try to make it work, dealing with legacy crap and questionable design decisions, instead of making your own framework (because it's still more efficient all risks considered).
The industry today is much more experienced in architecture in general (e.g. no newest programming language - Rust, Go, Zig - even _has_ inheritance, though it was the norm and the cornerstone in app design 10-20 years ago with C++/C#/Java/Javascript/etc). I'm asked what SOLID is almost at every job interview, even if the team has no idea how to use it. It's like people has so much to consider it's becoming a time sink in itself.
The funniest part is that all that experience doesn't help in the slightest, people couldn't do proper architecture 20 years ago and they still have no idea today. But instead, we get unhealthy amounts of caution, meetings and overestimates. It often poisons the top management decisions, one company I've talked with was trying to launch a new project, they wanted a crap ton of backend tech for a basically startup-like product, like bruh, you don't have a single user yet (and your product doesn't look like a next big thing), a simple server app written in Node working on a toaster will serve you for years. You're not Netflix, you're not Discord, you don't need k8s (at least now), your first iteration will be thrown away because of changes in the product anyway, just do the thing now and rewrite and improve later when it's really needed. You cannot do everything perfectly from a first try because today's perfect is tomorrow's legacy pile of trash. The mindset of writing a perfect code, unintuitively, wrecks your codebase up because you don't expect change when you should (e.g. making a Christmas tree of inherited objects instead of highly modular design where you (should) know it's gonna change in a few months).
The industry has become a cargo cult.
There's definitely more overhead and bloat now as games get bigger in scope and run on more platforms. If you make the smallest change, did you thoroughly document it, update the entire flow, did you test it on the latest codebase, did you test it on the last latest codebase, are you aware of the six upcoming changes to your dependencies, did you think of what the code could look like two weeks from now, did you submit your change record, did you do a risk analysis, if your manager aware, is his or her manager aware, was it approved by the change group, is the QA team aware, what phase of the moon is it, etc.
@@basicfacekick it has become kinda impossible to know for 100% what a single change is doing all the way down to bare-metal
I'm not a dev so correct me if im wrong, but don't the layers of abstraction make everything so easy chatgpt can do it. I can code some python for shits and giggles, but if I was trying to allocate ram with machine code I would be fucking lost. The benefit with people like you who have experience with machine code and assembler ist you really understand what actually is going on under the abstraction.
Im thinking of playin this for my supervisors here where i work. And im in a completely different field. These feelings similar everywhere to some degree.
Great vid.
To play devil's advocate, I'm an engineer (not for video games), and if someone asks me to do something on a Tuesday that will take me maybe an hour or two to do, I'll probably say that I'll get it to them by the end of the week. Not because it will take me that long, but first of all, I'd rather under promise and over deliver. And second of all, I have other shit to do during my week, your stuff doesnt just get moved to the top of the pile.
I find this annoying on multiple levels. I started as a developer and eventually became a PM. Firstly, as a PM I would be pissed about someone giving me such a vague and nonsense answer when I know how long roughly it should take, secondly it annoys me that your "someone" wouldn't ask what's involved, are there any potential difficulties and what else you have on your plate, so I can prioritise the work. Clearly, your "someone" is utterly incompetent, and if I was his boss, he'd be out the door It also annoys me that you work in an environment where blatantly lying instead of discussing it exists, and that you would rather lie than speak up. Everything is wrong if this is your experience and very unprofessional on both sides.
@@aldunlop4622 If you know something will take an hour or two to do, and you want it done *now*, THEN TELL THEM. Tell them it's a priority and that if you can get it to them in a day or two it would be appreciated.
The thing is the engineer doesn't just have YOU as one of the projects they're working on. If they're working on 10 projects at once and another project has an owner or client or PM that requires them to provide daily updates, for example, your request will be in the backburner until you say something. You should know this if you claim to be a project manager.
@@Keirnoth As a PM I want everything done as soon as soon. I don’t know what other work you have on. Just communicate to avoid any confusion.
As a software dev, I can confirm most developers in big companies just dont wanna work more than 2h a day
@@Sh1ft3r1 "its a generation issue" said literally every generation in recorded human history, not exaggerating
@@Sh1ft3r1if it's a generational issue each generation, then it's a human issue
if you are an exec in the company you get labelled as a grapist if you push the developers
6h for me, unless it's extremally boring, not fulfilling task then you are right.
@@plastered_crab if its a generational issue each generation, then it might not be an issue at all
Tim Cain has a wonderful channel. It’s like a proper course on how to make games in
the right way.
Just found it tonight. Gonna go through his catalog tomorrow!
Tim is wonderful, and I hope this brings him more subscribers.
7:11 I also get this manic when I'm deep in some design/scripting work. Freaked out the class once when I suddenly leapt from my seat yelling with joy after fixing a game breaking bug that I had been working on for a week straight. Makes me feel good knowing I have this in common with a game developer I greatly admire.
There is rule in business that says, competent people will be promoted above their level of competence, and then be doomed to failure. You see this most in big companies. If you refuse the promotion, the company will see you as hostile rather than reasonable. In government you often see people promoted based on seniority rather than skill and results.
Its why Anakin became Darth Vader
As someone who worked in a collaborative and creative job, this is so real. I would take responsibility for my work and I would put my name on things. What happened was that if anything went wrong even if I had no hand in it, it was put on me. Because everybody else wanted as little responsibility as possible.
Even then, I still took responsibility and tried to take on a leadership role even though I was not in that position. I did it because I had a passion for my work and wanted to see good outcomes. Once I was able to rally some motivated people to work together, the upper management got on my case about exceeding my job. So, these environments are created and creativity is snuffed because it's too much of a "risk". They want what is safe, and they want thier workers to do what is safe.
I had to quit my job because of these issues and myriad of others, but after years of trying to lift up my co-workers only to see them be pushed back down and all the blame be put on me, I just couldn't deal with it anymore. I feel guilty because I know that place is in a worse spot without me, but my mental health was starting to suffer too much.
I hope you are ok and work at a better place now man.
It is super frustrating to see corporations, and some small businesses, push the narrative that quiet quitters, and big projects are the reason we can't have nice things. When they punish people who go above and beyond at the same time.
Seems batshit insane, but it is likely malice or corruption from executives/managers.
The rot starts at the head. It's like how group projects at (public) school are always finished by one person (me)
Management is poison to creatives.
You don't need to feel guilty for anything, your managers were arseholes and probably saw you as a threat to their authority because you dared to show some initiative, half the reason they kept giving you shit would have been to get rid of you anyway. Just be glad you got out before they broke you.
"Got on my case for exceeding my job"
If you hear that from any industry or company you are in it will die. I'm glad my company encourages initiative.
Tim Cain is the godfather of modern RPGs and one of the best game devs of all time. This video just proves that he still knows his stuff after all these years.
@@bhbh9939 uh, what?
I bought all the games he made, but not enough other people did. They were all massively underdeveloped brilliant games. Had they been more corporate, maybe he is the head of the biggest games company in the world. The guy has swing an missed for 10 years and more.
@@dotapark The demo for Fallout was the first time anything like that had been released. It is difficult to understand if you were not there to experience the release of those games because it brought forth things that are common place now.
@@emptyempty8310 I think you commented to wrong person maybe?
@@dotapark Oh I see, my mistake! I thought you posted "uh what?" to thorsday121s comment but you were instead replying to a deleted comment.
I just finished my bachelors in computer science and I am will to admit that I know the basics across several languages up and down the order(from machine code/ assembly to python/Java). I lack higher level knowledge and I am fully aware of it and will need a mentor to bring me up to speed. On top of no one wanting to take accountability the more senior people are not guiding the new/entry level people leading to this issue where people with basic knowledge and no other skills have years of experience but that is the entire work force.
Good to see you liked his video, I've been watching some of his videos for game design and they're pretty good.
Worked as a consultant for a few game companies
Theres really two archetypes of companies that exist
A close knit team of high performers (sounds like his whiteboard story for fallout)
And
Adult daycares where its all about being nice not actual skill of employees
I've been lucky to always end up in the first type of companies. But my current job is of the second type. I once got an HR 101 meeting for naming a function `getUserOrDie`. "We don't use such words in this company"
@@CethrisThat isn't a good name because what "die" actually means is unclear (throw an exception? return failure code? What?). But that certainly isn't an HR issue either
I’m a Salesforce consultant and this is true across any tech industry. Small Private sector orgs usually have the high performers vs large orgs/Government/state level projects are usually where we do most of our baby sitting and deal with the most whining.
those exist in other areas of software development too, once when I was a web dev I saw a company I worked for go from the first type to the second in real time, it was really sad
it all started with them hiring new HR people to bring "more culture and diversity" to the company
@@NatureBoi80 the worst I've seen was a struggling company was willing to pay for weekly doggy therapy days in office despite bleeding cash.
Go to a damn dog park on your lunch lol
Id love for you to get this guy on your stream for a lengthy interview. I feel like there is a need for more opinions straight from the source, actual devs (that are not currently actively involved in the game/games that are talked about)
This comment needs an upvote.
lol what? thats not what he does! Actual content that takes effort? Why when he can just react to what others made...Forget about it
@@strahaironscale571work smarter not harder.
I don't understand why people criticize Asmon for react videos. He's worked his way up to have a viewer base that enjoys his commentary. He's done a variety of videos and has found his niche - why be butt-hurt over it? Kudos to him. I admire the fact that he can simply talk about a video and he's respected enough that people listen... And he can make a living doing it! He also uses a part of his wealth to invest back into the gaming world to hopefully make an avenue to circumnavigate the very issues being discussed in this video.
I would love it if he could have an in-person interview, but honestly, this video covered a lot of what would probably be discussed.
@@ashleybennetts3108misersble ppl just want to cry about anything
@@ashleybennetts3108 work smarter not harder doesn’t apply here, he adds nothing to the original video, the only reason he does this is for the viewers to see him watch videos.
Back in 2015 we were all fighting to get rid of reaction content, because it just really doesn’t need to be here, but it is.
I’m just saying what we know already.
As an 'old timer' software developer (not in videogames) the story about the boards and the names just doesn't click... maybe back in the day, before agile, you could moan about something like that... but nowadays? Try and refuse to get a ticket assigned to you, and inherently stick your name on it, and see what happens with your boss / team / SM / whatever... nothing good, i can assure you. It's just the way we work, be it videogames, consumer, banking, healthcare... we assign tasks to teams, then divide big tasks in smaller tasks, put them on boards (digital nowadays), and either assign them directly to people or let the team pick from the to do list. Nothing special about game devs there, we ALL work like this. So it would be absurd to refuse to put your name in the tickets. Rest assured internally it is PERFECTLY known who made what, or who changed what line of code and when. Just my 2 cents, great vid!
EDIT: And yes, totally blame nowaday's agile methodologies for things taking forever to actually get done in a consistent state,and for releasing unfinished stuff. The sheer level of bureaucracy, meetings about meetings, reports about reports, layers of useless stuff, arbitrary deadlines, and clueless QA is freakin astonishing. Back in the day we used to take our time to thoroughly define stuff even before starting to throw code. Nowadays this is considered a waste of time. Go figure...
They work in bi-weekly sprints = 80h.
4h sprint planning.
2h hours story point voting
4h backlog refinement
4h sprint review
2h sprint retrospective
10x 30 min = 5h dailys
21h Just for the overhead of the sprint.
Many other meetings I ommit here, like team meetings, brainstorming, demos, discussions in delivery metrics, etc...
The rest of the time is for unit testing, merge reviews or simply mangling stuff on the Jira board, documentation, etc...
There is hardly any time to develop anything.
I've been a software dev for large and small companies for over 15 years. He's not wrong, but caution comes from working in larger companies. I HAVE to pad my estimates because I'm CONSTANTLY interrupted by HR meetings, TPS reports, and project managers demanding status updates multiple times a day. How can I possibly get anything done quickly when I rarely have a single day where I have 4 hours of uninterrupted time?
@@Shizlgizl2 min question leading to 30mins of getting back on track lmao. Edit that out, sounds bad
@@ShizlgizlTo be honest. that issue could have been avoided if the dev just said the reason or explained so he could understand instead of walking away. For Tim it is unfathomable for something that he himself knows would take ~45 minutes to do (as he speaks out of experience) and they say it takes me 4 weeks to do. like I understand he would want answers.
but here the thing if you had that white bord and did what it say will you still need thos reports?
Similar situation here. However what we're doing is reducing capacity for each Sprint based on the number of meetings and all other non engineering work stuff. So the tasks are estimated based on how much actual time it needs to be completed but there is smaller number of tasks put in a Sprint.
Are you sure about that
The fact that the father of Fallout said the truth is shocking and i do love his reasoning, he made one of my favorite series, and he is still here in the trenches, making more great things
What's shocking about a father telling how it is, bud?
If nobody want to work why would it be a surprise, Asmon would be homeless without streaming.
Crazy how the fallout games turned from the old world's politics, egos, being something to let go, a warning and a lesson to be learned
To the radio station playing songs about Adam bombs and the world being about patriotism and having fun shooting stuff
@@Plight_ It's because the worst possible thing happened to the franchise, it got bought by bethesda
For an example of how crappy modern gaming programmers have become...
In 1997 both Fallout and Diablo launched.
Diablo was originally going to be a turn based game. The team had a meeting on a Friday and it was decided that it would be better as an action game (click on skeleton, warrior hits skeleton, etc.).
David Brevik wrote ALL THE CODE to convert the game to action based before Monday morning - the devs were playing the first iteration that day.
As a software dev, we do pad estimates, if we think we need 45min for the code, we might ask for half a day just in case, if I were to ask for 4 weeks I'd probably loose the job.
Same thing here with cars, the manufacturer has a specified time for removing and installing parts but they're rarely accurate so we have to add time
Every engineer pads estimates just in case, but 4 weeks to implement an aggro list with 'hit' and 'attack' callbacks already implemented... I mean, I'd be embarrassed. I don't think I'd get that much even to learn a whole new language. xD
I lost a job because I was too efficient. I worked 2 to 3 hours a day and the boss didn't like that. But there was nothing for me to do after that. They hired someone incompetent who take 8 hours to do what I did in 3, and the boss is very happy to see those hours on paper.
rookie mistake.
This is a major problem with team bloat that often gets ignored. There’s so many people being hired that you can’t possibly train them all. And you can’t even assign them meaningful work that will teach them skills because there isn’t enough to go around.
The tech industry has this the worst because they have gotten in the practice of hiring people not for how they can use them, but to prevent anyone else from using them
"So many people hired that you can't train them all". This isn't exactly a true statement. You can train everyone correctly if you hired correctly.
Look at a music symposium of over 100 musicians simply picking up a brand new sheet of music they've never seen before and ALL of them playing it perfectly as if they mastered it years ago.
The management sees all resource as equal. They don't realise that some systems take months if not years to be comfortable with.
@@TalZadios you're 100% correct. the issue isn't that it's impossible to train people, it's that whoever is managing the onboarding process is doing a shitty job as well as people who are in a position to train people after that point when they see they aren't doing what they should/don't know as much as they could.
@@TalZadiosWhat a bizarre comparison, sightreading music is a very specific skill that they trained at for years, from high school all the way to post-grad. The software world doesn’t have anything like that
for a project manager it takes one woman to grow a kid in their womb 9 months and 3 women 3 months.
Big thing I miss about 90s early 2000s gaming is companies took big risks and made all sorts of game no matter how weird they were.
I mean they still do pretty much, you are the one who forced himself to follow the same few old companies bro
@@GreatRusio Nope. Nowadays it's either AAA no risk Boring crap or Good indie games that could be even better with enough funding. Another difference is games didn't require as large of teams or millions of dollars to make then either.
@@GreatRusio Cap. Big Cap
@@GreatRusio My face when I mostly play indie games
Check out itch
Got a computer science degree, and went into IT because I didn't want my work with people like those who don't know what they are doing and only break shit. I would have loved working with this guy, because if I said that it would take me 4 weeks and he showed such short pseudo-code to do it, I would try to interact more and listen to him more as he has so much knowledge that would only benefit me.
Same, would've loved to work for him in my early days. I may have still been in game dev lmao
I always worked with Jira, we always know who works on what and if you break something, you're going to fix it. I think it's more about if a company has or not an engineering culture. Maybe the dev he asked for the estimate was a junior and didn't know anything about the existing APIs. He wasn't vulnerable for sure, he didn't know how to do the story quickly, that's a junior move. Maybe they have a super long pipeline that even if the thing is coded now it won't be in the staging env for 1 week, we don't have the full picture, but for sure the algo he described was indeed a good place holder and quick to do.
This is a problem in tons of different industries not just game development. My brother works at a company that does audiobooks and you should hear some of the horror stories he tells me about recent college grads who get hired in. It's like they wait to find the most petty things to complain and go to HR about. It's actually shocking the things he's told me that they complain about.
Tell yoyr brother to go to HR to ask for a meeting about people who complain about everything 💀
And that's exactly why I don't believe any of the allegations at Activision. I hate that company but look at the people who are complaining.
@@Lostouille People think an HR is some safety net thing but really they only their to make sure no one is breaking any company rules or laws. Little do people know, every time you report something to them, they file that and keep it. In the end, you're going to find people trying to get out of work and get paid. At my dad job, they were digging and hit a natural gas which had a funny smell. They called the inspector and it was a sulfur deposit and told everyone it was fine since in open air and it wont harm you. People kept complaining, so they said fine. Shut the job down, brought in the rubber suit with oxygen tanks and told them to get back to work. Now those guys were wearing rubber suits in the heat sweating their asses off all day.
this is what happens when you have overly feminized a workplace. over 40 years of working I've seen it go from non-existent to getting so bad company's collapse. it's not in every industry.
@@johndodo2062women?
Not bending the knee to corporatism is a big reason Fromsoft games are doing so well. They are chock full of artistic vision and story.
Absolutely. Almost all games people have been praising recently are INDEPENDANT studios or straight up non-American. The only developer from America that is drenched in corporatism, but produces high quality games is Rockstar Games.
Baldur's Gate 3 is NOT American and INDEPENDANT. There is no corporate board telling devs what to do. The corporate boards have no idea what fun gameplay is, but they sure do know how to make an item shop.
I like fromsoft as much as the next guy but it was pretty clear that Elden Ring being open world was them pretty blatantly following AAA trends
@@VGZTeaTime i kinda sorta agree to this, but i kinda chalk that up to their decision. I think whatever FromSoft makes, the publishers they work under understand that they're a company that you take a hands-off approach with and something wonderful gets made. Even if FromSoft decided it though, yeah, open world format sucks way harder than the painstakingly designed and intricate mazes that are the Dark Souls 1 and 2's worlds. Elden Ring and all other open world just-for-the-sake of it games just have so much dead space between major locations, its a dumb gimmick that the public has latched onto.
@@VGZTeaTimecan’t say if they were following trends or not. I’d like to imagine they really just wanted to shake things up a little considering all previous iterations were not open world.
@@VGZTeaTime Their take on open world has their creative stamp all over it though. Take a dozen random open world games and all feel like slight variations of each other in terms of the world design...ie cookie cutter. From's version of Open world in no way look like the others its a game instantly recognizable as standing out different like Zelda is with its version of Open world. I think that is the key differece...there are no shortcuts, it's their vision from start to finish.
I recently started making mods for ALL the fallout games, skyrim and arma.
They could have made 30 fallout games with the resources at bethesda
Software dev POV: That aggression priority target list; yah. 30-45 minutes should be plenty of time to implement in C or C++, which I guess the original Fallout would have been made with. That said, I've had times with a 4 month backlog of 30 minutes to 16-hour tasks, so sometimes there's miscommunication of how long it will take to make versus when it will be done. Had 3 bosses that kept shuffling what was prioritized and couldn't agree on which tasks should be focused on.
Double the estimate of focused development work because you get disrupted and there will be as much overhead as development time, and you have to include your testing time. This just makes management planning easier and more accurate.
If you don't know how to tackle a task, it may take significantly longer. If you run into some undocumented issues - yes, well, there goes the planning. Borland c++ Builder 3.5 (I think) had a memory leak. It took us months to find out what the problem was, and it was only fixed by upgrading our compiler.
Oh man, as someone who works in an office, i can tell Tim is one of the real ones.
Its the same everywhere; if the leadership doesnt define and live the work culture, their employees will
There's cogs in the machine that move and get those where they need to, and then there's those that don't do much and just clog the machine. Tim was the one that kept everything running smooth.
@@Klouneworks 10/10 going to use this on "as a" posts lmao
Yeah it's so annoying seeing people just blaming the actual dev grunts who build the game as if they're the ones at fault. Management is responsible for everything they do. It is their fault if things are not operating well. In a lot of companies the upper management is full of out of touch morons who barely understand how to run a studio.
Imagine going to work and be expected to do some actual work.
Good video. You have a good theory on big corporations, but it needs a deep dive by directly talking to a bunch of game directors and normal game artists and techs in the industry. Looking forward to it!
I love seeing your thoughts on this, Tim’s channel is one of my favorites! His insights are invaluable.
I've spent ~15 years doing software development (both developer + manager) at both startups & big companies. There's another side to what Timothy is saying:
1) Padding estimates: Devs often have to work with shitty spaghetti codebases, which means it takes a *lot* longer to do an intuitively simple fix. Instead of changing the code in 1 place, they'd have to change it in 5 places. If they forget one place then they introduce a new hard-to-find bug, which itself takes tons of time to find and fix.
Truth is, most devs like to work with clean code. Senior devs like to spend time refactoring, which basically means detangling spaghetti code and making everything nice, neat and compartmentalized. So, why do you have shitty spaghetti codebases? Higher-ups will set some bonus-driven deadline, try to "push the team" super hard, resulting in devs taking shortcuts and neglecting their sleep and mental health which causes them to make more even mistakes. That's how we get large shitty spaghetti codebases.
2) Greed. There's a saying in software development: Pick 2 of 3, fast, cheap, and good. Big corporations churn out AAA titles quickly by hiring shitloads of people. More people means more meetings, more "alignment", more egos and politics. This explains why their games have no soul. But it also explains why Baldur's Gate 3 took six years to develop, three of which were in open beta.
There's a saying in our field: Pick 2 of 3 -- fast, cheap and good. And it turns out that buggy and poorly-written AAA titles still rake in billions. So if you want to get better games, have some self-restraint and don't buy it if it's crap.
"Truth is, most devs like to work with clean code. Senior devs like to spend time refactoring, which basically means detangling spaghetti code and making everything nice, neat and compartmentalized. So, why do you have shitty spaghetti codebases? Higher-ups will set some bonus-driven deadline, try to "push the team" super hard, resulting in devs taking shortcuts and neglecting their sleep and mental health which causes them to make more even mistakes. That's how we get large shitty spaghetti codebases."
Def true. There's also the case of arrogant assholes who say that an app thats maintained by 8000 devs and has 20million lines of code could be cleaned up by 50 engineers and maintained by them. Which is what happened at Twitter. It's basically a way of rationalizing a way of saying "I'm so smart I could do this by myself", even though if they were a junior there's no way that they could refactor 20m/50=400,000 lines of code. That seems like quite the task to me.
And honestly changing the code in 5 different area's is usually around a quadratic increase in difficulty, so its more like 20 times more difficult something than 5 times more difficult.
Pick 2 is my favourite saying for nearly everything. Because it nearly always fits. And I only buy crap when it's on sale.
And I haven't bought a triple-A title on release for nearly two decades.
I always wait until the Beta Phase is over and the full game is released. .. which for modern games means buying the GoTY package including DLC's.
i just learned my lesson dipping my toe back into pc gaming and bought the new cyberpunk update bullshit(on sale) what a piece of shit game, still, its just bad all around, bad acting, bad writing, the game never shuts the fuck up
Additionally on point 1 from another dev (Web, Desktop, DBA): Sales and Marketing not making up their damned minds, You just spent your work-day to jam in a new feature we wanted? Great, now change it, flip it on it's head. Takes a week to declutter the old feature and put in the new feature... Sales and Marketing strike again "Y'know what, we want it to be integrated with this whole new third party feature, and change it around to be more dynamic and reactive, you can do it right?"... three more weeks of gutting the second new feature, jamming in this new integration, working with API keys and making S&M's new ephemeral changes put in place... and suddenly you have the head of marketing demanding your neck because the project's now out of scope by five weeks.
Every time... EVERY TIME... you engage with the customer, never give your first estimate on the spot based on memory alone, if put on the spot, go long and say I'll need to review the requirements, but it could take X time, follow up in the next few hours or the next day in the latest with a revised timeline after reviewing the code.
So, that guy saying 4 weeks, sure they could have been snow-jobbing, or, they could be dealing with several other projects in their pipeline and four weeks was when he could get a fairly inconsequential dev item through their pipeline, or, it could have been an extension of what I've experienced when it becomes shifting goalposts, and the dev is one-burned-twice-shy.
I don't think it was the last item, (Give a long number then revise after review if forced to give a time) given that the team leader had to step in, but I also feel like we're getting only a portion of the puzzle here, he's approaching it from an old-dog perspective. "We did this back in our heyday! Why can't you?" meanwhile security, coding standards, hell graphical codecs have changed dramatically since FO2, also, anyone who's modded games before Skyrim, they would know that the older the game is, the greater nightmare of spaghetti code and black-box systems exist within it.
If memory serves Fallout 2 had two notable mods: The cat launcher which replaced the sprite for the rocket from a rocket launcher with a running cat, and the FO2 "MMO" Russian mod which... while funny as a proof of concept... was little better than everyone just grabbing the nearest SMG and obliterating any player they saw in Shady Sands.
Thank you for your insight. You deserve more of a platform than Asmond haha. I'm about to graduate in school and hoping to break into this field at some point soon
As a senior software dev in a large corporation I've been pulled aside and scolded by managers for undercutting their estimates - when I should realistically be the authority on what actually needs done to complete the task. It really takes the wind out your sails, to the point that I'm now I'm very much the "fuck it I guess it'll take 4 weeks" sort of developer for now.
glad someone is pointing this out, I need to hear from his employees as well for counter perspective. This sounds a bit like the manager/the boss imagined something and how they want it and its just a pie in the sky or are lying.
Had that happen, bosses lie all the time
Why do they care? Is it job security or what?
I swear 90% of app/software dev's saw that Star Trek episode with Scotty saying you should double your estimates to always "over deliver" and went "oh my gods that genius" rather then realising it's toxic behaviour that fucks over your entire team. But yeah I've had to swallow the same pill in my office and always add an extra arbitrary amount of time to anything I'm asked to estimate in order to "play the game".
As a product owner, I'm sorry you have to experience this. It's the job of the PO to protect the developers, and work on time estimates.
@@loopinglouie9709 My product owner is great and never tries to overestimate, have people nothing to do or make them do additional hours to finish exactly on time. It's not black or white.
Going to take the opposite stance here.
Im a software engineer (web dev) and Ive seen what goes on behind the scenes.
Dev gives estimate that is spot on ( couple of days).
Gets into the code, and finds that a terrible dev wrote the code and the architecture is bad and its actually going to take 2 weeks now.
Dev relays info to mgmt and then they get chastised and yelled at and gets fired or bad performance review.
Other devs see this, now all estimates are 5x what they actually think it will take.
Congratulations, bad mgmt has raised the cost of dev by 5x for all future tasks and stories.
Here's another example,
dev, lets call him Bob is and all his teammates are working on "super important feature" for stakeholder Y. A bug is found and stakeholder Z wants it fixed.
Bob and his team now have to serve two masters. And have to try to sneak in feature Z while still trying to hit the release date target for feature Y.
This is why they give a large estimate for something that should be trivial. Cause they have other shit to do.
I hate this, "people are lazy" take, cause its the same sort of lies that get circulated everywhere. Even though people are just busy or covering their ass or both.
It's also worth pointing out that the developer from the video Asmongold is watching is notorious for being project lead of super buggy games. Most famous example is Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines, which is pretty much unplayable without fan patches 😅
He even mentioned in another video of his that for original Fallout they had a critical crash bug that was discovered just a few weeks before launch and delayed the game a bit, and because of this this crash he got a cut to his bonus despite releasing such an awesome game (and the reason he left the company).
And that was with his own project that he started from scratch. I can't even imagine how much more chaotic it is with using legacy code left by some other people.
Fallout and Fallout 2 were some of my favorite games as a kid, right up there with HOMM3, D2, CS 1.4, and X Com terror from the deep.
Good times
Padding work time is how the entire corporate system operates. Task going to take you 2 hours? Give me a week. Task going to require multiple days of work? I’ll have it ready a month out. This is one of the huge disparities between blue and white collar jobs. An hourly worker is literally doing their job the entire shift. White collar worker does 2 hours of work in a 9 hour day.
You nailed it.
Almost like they pointed this out decades ago with a little known indie movie…Office Space 😂
I think ultimately it's an issue of mandatory 40 hour work week. If what you're assigned to do can be done in 10 hours but you're stuck in the office for 40 hours a week anyway where's the incentive to do your job in a timely manner?
@@Moonmi747 You hit the nail on the head there. I remember being baffled by this when I got out of school and first started working. Now I am doing just like everybody else.
Me, the hourly paid engineer 😅. Honestly I like it more, I work the same hours but I get paid OT or can bank OT for vacation.
I work at one of Swedens biggest companies and we do almost exactly like he described in the beginning of the video. You get assigned tasks on a timeline and each week we have a big meeting going through it all to see what each person has done, what he/she needs help with etc. And I think it works really good and there’s no toxicity about it, but good conversation revolving issues that arise.
"I work at one of Sweden's biggest companies-"
Bro, say no more, I am so sorry. F.
Really? Then how come there haven’t been any memorable games except maybe Witcher 3 in the past 5 years
So you fucked up Battlefield? Yeah that format is not working mate
Sounds like the structure of the Scandinavian countries, we do just do a debate in a different way.
Owning a task or issue is so fulfilling, especially when you know you have others to help if you need it.
That first story makes me feel so good as a dev knowing I'm nothing like those children.
Game industry became way too glorified and mainstream. And now the passionate people who actually cared got replaced by normies who are just after money
They haven't been replaced, they're just not working at EA or Ubisoft
At a big AAA company, if you have a really talented and motivated gameplay programmer who wants to implement a really cool feature that is outside of the scope of the game or wasn't planned, it will almost certainly be shot down in favor of the tried and tested formula (aka, similarity to previous games from that company). This is simply how it will always work at these companies, shareholders don't care about innovating and they certainly do not want to take risks, they want you to churn out games that are moneymakers first and foremost.
At a small indie studio, if one developer gets a cool idea they can simply run it by the other coders and get to work. There is a lot more trust placed in individual workers than at a big company.
thats why I like Valve, AAA private company doing their thing on their time and with steam keeping the money flowing
still when it takes over 5yrs to make any game..thats too long in my view..previous eras they claimed similar things but managed to speed up development ,this era has so many excuses and games taking 7-8yrs should be deemed unacceptable..
@@jackstraw4222 You’re not gonna get innovation if you don’t have long development times. You need to make up your mind do you want quick games or great games. I’ll be honest I’m fed up of reskins of the same game for every genre. While they can bring COD out yearly and charge people £100 for skins and expansion pass or spend a decade or two making something that could last a decade or two but people cry and they bring broken early access that goes bust
shorter games would be better, cut the time down to 7-10hrs and have good graphics and game-play...to many major games single player drags on the middle and then i dont bother coming back to finish it..
@@SuperWeedPoweryeah, they are soo innovative that they had to add smooth locomotion to half life alyx at the last minute despite it being an established standard over a year prior to it releasing lol.
I'll always hold that game against em,not becuase it was that bad, but becuase of their unwillingness to think outside of their tiny little bubble and ruined what could have been the next great vr fps.
Tim's a legend. Created the game that most marked me as a gamer. Fallout 1 and 2.
Well mostly Fallout 1 though, but yeah he is a Legend.
He didn't want to make Fallout 2 and left the team very early in the process, also while disapproving with a number of choices they took (like the temple at the beginning of the game).
Eh, for me it's Arcanum... had no idea he was behind it until now :) ... but yeah. some great great games have something to do with mr. Cain.
@@SloulDesTucs I mean, the temple is probably the worst part of fallout 2
Never even played those and fallout 2 has my favorite game story of all time. It's definitely up there.
Definitely a G amongst gamers
The chickens are running the hen house. This is what happens when the the programmers think they are the only ones that can do what they do, and the boss does not fire them.
I went to and graduated from film school and this was true even there. I wanted to write a short drama about a man and women who fall in love only to find out they’re blood related and uncover a whole dark secret within their family. All my peers screamed about me potentially getting blacklisted for promoting incest. Then, when I decided to make a simple zombie movie, everyone wanted to be part of it but so few people showed up. Right now, I’m trying to start the career I have yet to have as a writer and storyteller by making a comic. Recently I had a friend get in touch with me from high school, someone who worked for some marketing firm. He was so much talk but never did his work. Then complained that we shouldn’t be having so many meetings. All in all, I think you’re right. People are just weak, and want to be part of something but don’t want to be held accountable.
Nice to see Timothy reacted by you, hope this push up his channel. He's a really good guy and has a lot of really interesting videos
Man, this hits hard. I am not involved in this industry at all, and am just a lowly warehouse manager, but i've had the kind of mentality from the second story for every job I've had recently. So many times I've overperformed, or my team overperformed and suddenly we are short staffed and struggling. I've gotten into the habit of complaining on behalf of my team, and pushing back, and trying to slow things down to save jobs and my sanity, when all our jobs could have been done fast rather easily. You just cant trust companies or owners to see that without thinking of dollar signs.
Oh yeah. Capitalist companies will always be driven by the profit motive. Short term profit before anything else. The health, well-being and efficiancy of the workers doesn't matter to them. If they can squeeze just a tiny bit more money out of you they will. The workers know their work much better than some suit who only sits on his ass all day counting his money, which is why we need workplace democracy.
As an ex-programmer, been there. Spent more time writing notes for the upper echelons than actually programming.
I was constantly being pulled off task to explain the task to people wanting to show their management that they understood it. Then it takes time to get back into the headspace.
Add to that, that nobody's permitted to revisit previously written common code that becomes ever less fit-for-purpose as the project expands (until much later in the project, if ever.)
It all meant that most of the 'good stuff' was written on my own time (unpaid) and had to be 'presented' to clueless suits for me to have what I needed to do the job.
That's just the tip of the iceberg - one that I'm, thankfully, not standing on any more. 😀
The amount of times asmon steps into the 'Dunning-Kruger effect' is wild
For real - dev says a task will take four weeks. Game designer who the last time he worked on production code was when whiteboards were the backlog says it should take 30 minutes. That immediately raised a flag for me on both ends of that assessment. Either way: the dev is saying “if I do this, I will need four weeks.” Either trust their judgement or escalate, which is what happened. Asmon again being quite ignorant of nuance here again
@@AlexWoodGarbagejust do your job you’re paid to do.
@@AlexWoodGarbage the issue here is the guy in the video KNEW how long it should take for what he was asking, he even said fuck it if you cant do it i'll do it myself and have it done in 45 min.
basically saying what im asking should only take you as someone whos worked on this game extensively with should be able to do what im asking with eas in 60 min.
it would be the same thing as me telling you to cut the grass using a riding mower in a yard thats only 100ft by 100ft and saying go cut the grass it shouldnt take but 20 min and you saying more like 6 hours.
if i know how long something takes and you tell me its going to take 1000 times longer then it should honestly you can get yo stuff and find new employment
@@AlexWoodGarbage the key difference is that the lead actually developed games and knew how to do said task (and did it), so this isn't much of a "clueless boss underestimates X task" situation. Yeah, there can be additional maintenance costs and a bit of extra work to actually make that code scalable, but 4 weeks is ridiculous regardless. Either the codebase is a complete a total mess, their production pipeline is as inefficient as possible, or the coder is uh... of questionable quality. Even worse how the coder didn't even bother to walk him through it, which kinda seals the deal imo.
@@0Heeroyuy01 no, he didn’t. He assumed it could be done within the hour, based on assumptions. When the person with the requirements says it’s an hour of effort and the one getting the requirement says it four weeks of effort, you can safely conclude they’re both wrong. One for making assumptions, the other for being overly defensive. They both should do better here. The dev not wanting to justify his estimation sounds sus, but we don’t have the full context. The lead coming in and backing the dev should tell you a lot here. The actual work having taken two weeks should tell you the rest: the dev wasn’t actually that far off, and from just hearing one side of the story we’re already hearing that this game designer can be difficult to work with.
Tim is awesome. Not only does he give great insight into game development but he’s also a great story teller. Probably the best channel I’ve seen on CZcams in years.
Not to mention he made some of the best video games ever to be made!
makes sense, most of the games he spearheaded had amazing stories
I'm a dev, I do have some feedback here (only 15 mins in). Estimates are estimates for you and your team, but leadership treat them as promises, and build everything around it. This makes a vague estimate into something you are now responsible for. Then when your estimate falls short, you get slapped (overtime, crunches, worst case fired/witholding raises). Especially for videogames, where there is a lot of R&d (emphasys on R, so a lot more unknowns). Having crunches for months due to a bad estimate is what leads to this stupid level of padding. It's trauma enforced by the industry. While each dev also need to be able to get above that and give proper estimates, some junior devs with less faith in their abilities will naturally pad the shit out of their work to be sure they are not stuck in another crunch time.
So really the industry created that problem. The best way to break this pattern of over padding stories/tasks is to encourage failure within your teams (obviously within reason). Failures are useful as they help pinpoint your limits as a team and narrow down your velocity (For simplicity, velocity is how quick and easily you can finish a task). When failure is punished, you get that type of shitshow as described in the video.
It's exactly this.
To add to this great point a lot of companies see failure to reach estimate as something they will replace you for or even make you first in line for lay-offs. (i've had plenty of managers say to pad it so we look extra productive so when lay-offs come around they are not looking at the extremely productive team!)
Hmm
Would that also be attributes to ways of working? If you find you are under estimating as the complexity is more than thought. Should you look to do more refinement to break them down into smaller stories and give a more clearer indication?
@@Azpep as a rule of thumb, when using Fibonachi to point stories, anything above 8 (even 8 can be broken down) should be exploded into smaller stories (IMHO).
If nothing else, a spike should be done to investigate the unknowns, which are pretty much always present in any 8-12 pointers.
Towards the end of the video when he was talking about managers and about having job specific knowledge. I’m very glad someone else is talking about this. In the past the way things kinda worked was those who went to college would become the ‘manager class’ they would be educated about the world and be able to teach themselves things effectively. This is parallel to the military where enlisted members are uneducated while officers are college educated. Essentially, anyone with a college degree could learn the job in an appropriate amount of time and be able to effectively manage it. This is simply not the case anymore ESPECIALLY with technology related jobs. I have personally experienced having a manager that knows absolutely nothing about how to actually do the job of the people they are managing. I have even been told that managers don’t need any experience with what they are managing at all. I’m fully confident that this is the root cause of many work place issues. If a person cannot understand the problem at hand, because they do not know what is involved in resolving it, that person has no place leading the people who do have that knowledge. For a person to be in that position, I would not consider that a manger, I would consider that nothing more than a middle man. Especially in environments where the workers are highly educated like engineering. The engineering manager might not be an engineer themselves and thus will not fully understand the nature of the happenings of their team. If someone is in that position it is their DUTY to try their hardest to learn the job that their subordinates do in an attempt to effectively and efficiently make the decisions for that team of people. This is also why many teams have a “manager” and a technical lead, effectively taking away absolute power, which naturally works better.
38:15 "bad coding" Tim did a video on this recently, spegetti code doesn't always start out that way, sometimes it ends up like that because of revisions and bug fixes but they don't have the time they need to organize everything. the code could be bad for a variety of things which isn't always the code itself, sometimes it the program you're using and getting them to admit it can take weeks.
This is what happens in every industry. The first generations are always those who have extreme passion, talent and willpower all together. Because if they didn't, they'd either be in other industries instead of this uncertain one, or fail in pushing through the difficult and unknown path. They're the vanguard, and they will take the hardships head on.
Then the industry takes form, investments are poured in, and things become relatively more safe and reliable. Jobs become just jobs, instead of and expression of love and passion, and therefor it attracts those who just want to do a job. The desire to create something outstanding diminishes over time and generations (at least the fraction of total people) and most of employees would be content by just getting payed, no matter what kind/quality of product they end up producing. In the end, it becomes much rarer to see a collective strong will to create something genuinely great.
God i will miss kojima and Nintendo legends, not everyone lives forever but I wish some people could 😢
Best comment
100% correct most people work today because it pays well not because they love the job
It's why Indie games in EA seem to get so much traction and hype behind them.
Look at Ark Survival Evolved, Valheim, and even Dark and Darker.
Passion projects that MANY people piled behind. Valheim is the weakest of them, but just looking at steam charts, they still get over 20k concurrent players some days.
Ark is about to be sunset for their new version, and their servers are still getting 20k-60k concurrent depending on the time of day.
I really wish we could get back the AAA studios grind of passion. Morrowind is a prime example. Bethesda was going to go under if the game failed, and so they went hard with different mechanics and ideas, and it paid off. Every single game after Morrowind has been a downgrade from the previous entry.
@@MGrey-qb5xz kojima is overrated af, if your game has more hours of cutscenes than of gameplay you need to start asking questions
As a software dev, the 2nd story is something that manifests in many teams, many times. There is almost always a senior dev that can do things 5-10x faster than anyone else, and that person is always the busiest on the team. The problem is when that senior dev is working on a large enough product, they simply cannot do everything, and they are forced to delegate to new hires or other junior members that cannot perform at that level.
true, but honestly what he asked for was one of the most basic requests I have ever heard. I am still in my fourth year of university, and I think I could probably do it in an hour or two. The absolute worst-case scenario is that it takes less than 3 and definitely not 2-4 weeks. I can see how this can happen tho. throughout my university education, I have encountered a lot of people who cheat the system. they will end up copying assignments, working in groups when it's an individual project, etc. I even got offered a deal with one of these guys to do every assignment in a course for $500 per assignment(there were like 8 in that class). so imagine what happens to a person who has gone through their entire university journey paying for assignments when they get to the stage of going into career fields. this is why it is important that you properly give them technical interviews when you are looking at potential hires.
@@toshibiswas3115 i doesn't matter how basic a request is. teams plan their work for a given period in advance with tasks that may have dependencies. you want something done fast, introduce it into the planning not pester some dev individually. It's also not about how long the task itself takes, but when it can be done. If I have one hour of time to do your one hour task in two weeks from now, it will be finished in two weeks. that doesn't mean i'm working on it for two weeks.
Ah yes, the infamous curse of the competent.
The people who invest the most in become good professionals and good at their career always get asked to do the hard stuff while the tier of people below does what they need to do to skate by with mediocre work that isn't challenging.
It's a rich get richer situation for her. The most knowledge heavy employees continue to gain more knowledge while the employees that keep getting assigned first week of work type projects stay the same skill level for years.
The problem is exacerbated by project managers who just want to push work out the door and they invest no time in challenging their team members who need it the most.
@@velorama-tkknyou're assuming that's the situation that's happened in the story the dev in this video told, but you don't know that, you're just speculating
As a senior dev I think I've developed a PTSD response to MS Teams ringtone.
4:12 - It depends a heck of a lot on the internals of the software. It might be trivial. It might require re-writing the entire thing. It's hard to know. And, as a software designer, you try to design things to be flexible in the ways that you anticipate they will need to change in the future. But predicting that is really hard, and the danger is that by making it flexible in some ways you make it less flexible in others which greatly increases the cost of you being wrong.
The most dangerous people are those who know a little about programming because they think they know how hard something will be. And they're almost always wrong.
The other problem is that you often don't know how long something will take when you start doing it. If the change isn't of a kind that was anticipated and designed for, there might be a whole lot of threads to pull.
My experience at entry level game design is management/corporate love quantity over quality. Having a big portfolio was more impressive than showing what you know about a piece of software and your problem solving skills. The only thing this kept making me think was that that kind of attitude was gonna bloat the quality assurance process and productivity because you would constantly be back tracking over simple mistakes. Like a level design that didn't have a performance pass on it because they didn't know what occlusion was, and the person wasn't saving alpha iterations either so you'd have to go in and perform surgery on the damn thing because too much of the art pass was already completed to start from scratch.
In summary, management like superficial speed that looks like results are coming fast even though corners will have been cut (intentional or otherwise) that make it unstable.
I work in industrial controls and the same lack of accountability is rampant here too. At this point, being accountable, having a good work ethic, and being competent in your field is essentially a super power.
It's also a massive liability if you don't have any access to management, and you're in an industry known for job purges on a cycle.
@@TheGoodColonelNo, it is not. I’ve worked non-stop since I was 13 years old (40 now) when I got my first job shoveling snow, mowing grass, and emptying trash cans for a group of churches.
Any worker that shows competency, reliability, and ambition always rises. Maybe not at the job they have now, but the next one. Maybe not in the career field they have now, but the next one. Always, every time.
Now as a business owner myself with 46 employees, you can bet your ass I do whatever is in my power to keep good employees. I’ve had employees come into my office and say they are putting in their two weeks because they can’t work the hours they have now, and they left my office with new hours and a raise. I’ve given employees who have a long commute vouchers for apartments, gas cards, or a company vehicle. I’ve created positions to promote good workers who ask for more responsibility, and find them more challenging work.
By the same token, if you’re not here to work hard, the exit is right over there.
When someone is a good worker, it shines through the haze of bullshit and lies. It’s obvious to anyone who even spends a day with a good worker. They’re going to succeed, somewhere, somehow.
@@TheGoodColonel Being bad at your job is WAAAAAAY more of a liability during layoff season than being good at it.
@@XOmniverse being an absolutely mediocre person with no blame to your name will save you more times than having your name everywhere on some wins and some losses.
@@TheSpicyLeg ok but that does not translate at all in a corporate environnement unless you're in sales. And even then, the good salesmen in corp usually stay at one place 2 years before moving on to a better pay somewhere else. Corporations reward mediocrity now. Putting your name out makes you a target, even if you do good.
As a professional software developer, there are absolutely jobs you need to pad estimates - and its the majority.
Because 3/4 of your job in many large organizations is dealing with absolute bullshit spreadsheets thrown at you by management, dealing with bizarre requests that aren't captured as effort, scope changes for no fucking reason and awful tickets you need to go back and forth with the reporter before you actually understand the problem space.
I've had jobs where by the end of it, I only got to *start* coding every day at around 3-4pm and finished up 7-8pm, because between meetings and random admin duties, you don't get time to code until everyone else clocks off and stops bugging you with "must have" bollocks.
So pad your estimates. Otherwise you won't get your sprint items done.
If you don't pad estimates, you end up working 80 hour weeks or don't hit your sprint goals, and who gets blamed then?
And if you work the 80 hours, you don't get paid extra.
And you don't own the game like early game dev or indies, you get paid a straight salary, so what incentive do you have to kill yourself over a game that gets you nothing more?
Bad management leads to bad workers. Smaller orgs you just talk directly to people and have way less need to do this, or smaller teams with a protective manager it works better.
Small companies too. I was working with (not for) a smaller company one time. This small company was in a business that made a lot of money with a staff in the dozens. The only overhead was machinery. Point being funding and salaries wasn't a major issue as their profit margins were extremely high.
They had an IT staff of three people, and all of them were management, essentially project managers without a PEMBOK as masquerading as developers. They had an issue. They needed sequential labels (1, 2, 3, etc). They refused to buy them, and I get it. For some reason printed media like that can almost make you sour what people charge. And it's so simple, why pay for it when you have devs?
Well, they had issues. They would open excel, type a number in a cell, drag it down 10,000 rows, and then print from there using the print address label functionality. Unsurprisingly, the print spooler in windows would die every time. These labels needed tracking, too. Knowing what number was tied to what item was extremely, extremely important. They'd try to print 10,000, it would crash at random amounts, like 3,741, every single time, and they'd have to look at the reel, find the last number printed, write it down, reboot the PC, and repeat the process. Obviously, this was extremely inefficient and caused all kinds of things like duplicates both for a single site and duplicates across multiple sites. I'll also point out these were reels of 1,000 labels. They'd also have to replace the reel in the middle of printing when a reel finished, which caused even more issues, and it often resulted in a lot of loss of labels.
With my system you clicked a button, it spat out 1,000, you replaced the reel, then clicked a button.
My solution was simple - I wrote a tool in JS and SQL that would do 1k at a time. It would log the last label printed, the site, auto fill in the last number printed+1, save what site the user selected last, etc, etc. Yes, tech can always crash so I still wrote ways to force override while blocking things like cross site duplications. It wasn't perfect, but I wrote it in 20 minutes and I printed 10k labels in 1k batches in under an hour while their system was giving them only a couple thousand every hour - and they needed 10s of thousands a day. They would assign an available staff member to do this 8 hours a day 5 days a week.
"Why can't we print 10k at a time? Our current system lets us do that. We can't click a button 10 times a day, we need to print these and be done." I of course pointed out you don't have any tracking, you have duplicates, you're attempting to print dozens of times a day, etc. They never ended up using it.
Corporations have bloat, and you're dead on about larger companies dragging you into meetings to talk instead of work, but people are people.
Precisely.
Not a game developer but as an Software developer, I can relate heavily to suggesting a quick and easy solution and it getting turned down, because it's not what the "know it all" lead envisioned. It's a circus working coperate sometimes...
This is for sure the same thing with the engineering field. So many times I have sadly managed to get more done than a group of engineers because I kid you not they have had to setup meetings to go over a meeting about future meetings
I've worked in a corporate setting, and I saw many coworkers just act docile and almost motionless. Everyone had to act "nice" all the time. They don't like it when people are yelling. They also don't like it if you make a fuss at lazy coworkers who are not even working. They fire people for insane reasons. My boss got mad when I was 2 minutes late. You can get in trouble for talking back and it's perceived the wrong way.
Gotta be careful not to have any "microaggression" incidents. Corpo world is adult daycare.
How angry they will get at you is directly tied to if you can make it a woke backlash at them or not
2 minutes what.
Many decades ago, game development was something people got into because they loved games. They had a vision they wanted to see come to fruition, and they and all the people who gathered around them weren't afraid to put their noses to the grindstone in order to make it happen. Now, the culture has shifted. Now, game companies are no longer a gathering of passionate nerds, but factories where people come to punch in, do their 9-5 and go home. It's no longer about "what do we have do to in order to make our games even better?" But rather, "what do we have to do in order to make sure we keep our jobs?" It's terribly sad.
You mean "what is the minimum amount of work we need to do to keep our jobs?"
To be fair, the games come off as super basic. There is a lack of polish that tells me the director or producer has passion, but no one else. I don't think they want to make the game they are working on, and they do it for 5 years minimum.
No, Devs are overworked and get paid terribly, they do more than just the minimum, its the game directors who orchestrate what the game is going to be. the Devs are just the painters and builders not the Architects.@@Mats1050
@@furyberserk Well, most devs work on bits and pieces of the game and they generally don't have a say in what they work on. It's up to the director and producers to assign them the correct work, or list the things that need to be worked on. They've got the masterplans afterall. A dev doing something other than the things that need to be addressed can throw a wrench into the system as that might not have been accounted for in the overall plans, and plans and other workflows might have to change to accommodate one dev's obsession. That's how you get disjointed feeling games with mechanics that don't mesh well. Communication is key.
And of course most people don't wanna work on the games they're working on. Ubisoft employs like half the industry, I doubt most devs wanna be making their trash. Nothing a single dev can really do about a game with thousands of people working on their own individual pieces of the game.
Tell me you don't work in industry without telling me you don't work in industry.
Epic. Thank you, As; thank you beardy boi. These are up close observations that need to be out there
And this is why indie games succeed so well.
Shareholders to appeal to, and people that just get paid to work on projects they don't really care all that much about.
I think the core problem is passion, or lack thereof.
IMO, a lot of what Tim mentions in the first part of the video is a symptom of Agile development as implemented in a corporate environment. Meetings all day every day, and padded estimates (because if you end up going over your "estimate" you are absolutely crucified) are all endemic to poorly implemented Agile, which is unfortunately the norm in most development houses today.
We were forced to adopt scrum at work. My team isn't co-located, and we're not all developers, so we're working on different things all the time. But a middle manager a few steps up the ladder went to an agile conference, and read a book about how it makes teams more efficient. So now we have planning sessions, retros, and daily standups in our team, talking about tasks that are actionable by only 1/4 to 1/3 of the team. It's an insane waste of time that breaks us out of the flow every single day. We've even asked if we can split the team into "sub-teams" with our own stand-ups so that we don't waste the time of the people who are not devs, and so that we can actually go into some detail discussing the tasks we're working on, but they won't let us.
Don't get me wrong. I'm sure scrum can work really well in the correct setting. But the way our team is organised is NOT the correct setting.
This is the joke. "Everybody USES Agile. Nobody DOES Agile."
@@timothyblazer1749 To be fair, I think at least my job does Agile decently. I have a scrum meeting every morning with specifically the more experienced dev I work with, just a minute of updates followed by however long we need to discuss practical issues. Big team estimation meeting at the start of every sprint, put the estimation results up on Jira. I honestly can't imagine what the hell everyone else is doing to mess up something this basic. The senior devs (I'm pretty fresh out of college) usually estimate longer than me, but they're also always right, so.
@@SeventhSolar It's not Agile unless the teams themselves control the pace of the work. That's where it always fails. You end up with management insisting on certain deadlines ( ignoring the costs voted on by the teams), or on certain work being prioritized, or on injecting work against the team's wishes.
In real Agile, management only can vote on the business objectives. They can't interfere with the technical work. At all. That includes PMs. And POs.
I agree with this for the most part. Agile is cancer, but there's not a better alternative for large teams that need to do iterative work.
Tims videos are absolutely phenomenal. The insights from his time in the gaming industry is invaluable.
We're lucky Tim chose to create his channel and make videos like these, I love'em.
Are invaluable*
Who is Tim?
@@jonasjonas8358 Timothy Cain, the creator of the mentioned video. He goes by Tim Cain, to most.
Some indie games are the only expression of game art left.
There are features that will get fixed right away. If it blocks revenue, it will be fixed.
If it doesn't block revenue, there are revenue blockers that need to be fixed first.
There is a reason for padding estimates or being cautious. You cant really judge how long something is gonna take if you dont even understand what you need to do in the first place. Software is hard especially working on large codebases that somebody else wrote.
it's fundamentally a management problem, it exists in every industry, global wise, doesn't matter if you are in third-world country or first-world country, doesn't matter if your company is small or big, as long as you're running a company you're gonna face this "people issue". Unfortunately, after running a company myself for 8 years now, i've learnt the hard way that firing people alone won't solve the problem at all, the management style has to change, company culture has to change, rules and regulations have to change, hiring policy has to change, as well as incentive and punishment policy, the list goes on, in short you gonna hire more 'wolf' instead of 'sheep', people say 'nah, this whole generation is like this,' which i don't agree at all, because there's always hard working people out there
I've honestly seen more passion in games put up by small indie developers than any AAA company running 2k+ developers for the last decade now, with games it really feels like quality of devs over quantity of devs
Word!
@@xxCrimsonSpiritxx The devs (not management) have no say in the final product. They're passionate and highly skilled at what they do for the overwhelming majority. To think otherwise is foolish.
@@johnjackson9767 Then I don't think you watched the video honestly, yes management has the final say, but believe it or not more often than not the management give a fairly flexible freedom to developers but on the condition that they add their microtransactions for example, and there are objectively speaking dozens of examples of bad developers butchering their games because they're simply not passionate enough about said project
@@xxCrimsonSpiritxx This is true, though there were plenty of butchered games back in the 90s when Fallout came out too. The scale is bigger because the industry is bigger. There doesn't seem to be budget numbers out there for Outer Worlds but considering the original fallout was just roughly a $3 million budget certainly Outer Worlds was a much bigger more ambitious game and with that comes trade offs. You can't expect indie like teams and dedication with a bigger scale IMHO, not without some serious leadership behind it that understand how that works (and even then it's not gauranteed).
"No-one want's to take accountability anymore" In my experience, this has to do, with people, especially bosses, not being able (or willing) anymore, to differentiate between things someone could have changed and things outside of your grasp. If you take the responsibility to many people feel invited to dump all blame onto you, regardless of whether it's actually your doing or not! In this toxic environment, of course no one will ever step forward an their own accord!
more worst. project manager will tell you implement it's stupid idea that we knew won't works in the first place. and we have wasting time to testing out it's stupid solution that we all knew it's gonna fail 100%.
Those commas, brah. 😂
B.S. Bosses have not changed. But a whole lot of software devs are not actually good at their job and look for every possible excuse to hide that fact and do less
I experience the younger generation as being heavily avoidant of personal responsibility.
As someone who has done men’s work for the past 6 years, accountability is hard for everyone.
@@J.B.1982 "men's work" wtf is that? Accountability is not a gendered trait, accountability applies to everyone.
“how can you say that it’s all dogshit if you didn’t eat the entire plate of dogshit” had me in tears
A lot of these companies are knowingly being filled with people that don't wanna do anything or will want to be doing anything than making the game. It speaks a lot to how personally i think writers should stop having such egos about working on games because the importance here should be getting capable peolpe who can make the video game (logically)
The problem is vast, but here's something I noticed. A lot of times in legacy systems, a single person or a small team will write most of the code. More often than not, it was terrible to look at, disorganized and nasty, but it worked. When something went wrong, the developer, who has an intimate understanding of the system, would know where to go and add more crappy code. These days, there's less disorganized code, but also less comprehension and responsibility. Now, you have leads, which could be the same type of people who made the messy but functional code, who are building teams of developers lists of requirements based on their understanding of building systems. The problem with that is that it is difficult to know what kind of issues you're going to face without writing the code yourself. So when a behavior occurs that is not expected, but the requirements are met... well it's not the programmer's fault and someone will have to figure out how to fix it later. Depending on the team, this may not be a problem. Bugs can be gathered and kept track of and fixed later. But it helps if your developers notice flaws and work to improve the existing requirements. If that doesn't happen, you get more organized but less functional code.
I think this is the most level-headed take. This is especially exacerbated by the fact that games nowadays are way more complex than they used to be, so bugs are often the fault of multiple systems not working well together and not just the fault of a single person. Outside of that, most beloved games are incredibly slapdash and buggy, but the core gameplay is decent enough people are willing to overlook them.
i dont know how much that particularly contributes to the issues in games, but its very noticable even to me as a CNC programmer. Its a type of programming which requires 100% perfection, as you can ruin thousands of dollars of material and work hours, but its not a technically difficult programming language at all. Its actually extremely simple BECAUSE of how important it is to get right, and i still sometimes struggle when reading others work. Depending on what im working on my handwritten programs can look very ugly, but i know what every single line does, and can get it perfect. If someone else tried to read it, even though it worked, they might struggle just because its so unrefined. This could lead to them not understand what the program does, and makes adding to it a mess.
I hate to think how exponentially difficult that is in software and gaming development, where the programming languages are 1000x more complicated. Id be interested in seeing the owner of larian discuss things like this, about the work environment for the programming and decision making in their games. They seem to only employ people who genuinely love the development process and who love games, something that seems to be lacking in other companies.
@@declancampbell1277 Ah yeah that makes sense. For what it's worth, software often doesn't need to consider the physical aspects of how code executes so you have that on software devs.
That said operating environment matters a lot for code execution too, which is why a lot of industrial devices run embedded OSes and have specific hardware requirements. The most stable video games I own are on imported modern arcade cabinets, which run on embedded windows and all cabinets running this game have the exact same CPU, GPU, motherboard, PSU, sound card, and I/O card. One of them expects to run at a very specific framerate 3 decimal digits out, but you don't have to worry about OS variants or stray services introducing a bit of lag like with normal consumer installs so I have the game on for 6 days straight at times.
There's a reason retro gaming and game emulation have been getting more popular over the last few years.
Say hello to my little Pentium 2.
It's because games today have no soul. They are just money grabs
Quest for Glory VGA edition is a better game than Starfield. Change my mind.
it's always been popular, you're just young and it appears to you that it got popular right when you first got into it. I had multiple classmates in elementary school emulating japanese pokemon gold&silver before they came out in the US, and i'm sure it was a thing well before I found out about it
@@Kowalskithegreat i'm having trouble believing that a bunch of elementary kids know what emulation is. we're talking about kids that are 5-10 years old here lol. maybe kids were just smarter back then but idk.
4:39, Game developer here. I can answer that for you.
Some AI systems are so complex and highly developed that parsing them for information to use or remove is a nightmare. We're talking teams of hundreds collectively writing millions of lines of code. That takes many years of steady development to accomplish. In the early days of *true* AI, it wasn't very wise for solo developers or small teams to attempt it because it would consume their budget in manhours alone. The solution was to develop the AI incrementally instead of going for a smart game straight out the gate. That's what he's referring to.
With incremental / modular development, they would write moderate blocks of code that would be used to accomplish specific things. They're rules for the system to follow. English systems typically read code from left to right, top to bottom. This makes the order of the rules, arguments, and instructions matter *a lot.* The programmers would stack rules, conditions, arguments, declarations, and instructions on top of each other in separate modules. These modules aren't only all of those things, they're also *automations.* This means that the system automatically carries out these commands as it reads the code. Simple enough, right? Well, what makes *true* AI genuine artificial intelligence is the sheer magnitude of commands in the document, the dev team's ability to predict circumstances, and the intricately laced restrictions that prevent conflicts and bugs. This makes the conditions included in each block equally as important as the order.
When developing an AI, one must avoid breaking rules already present in the code. In a specific instance, if you tell the system to face forward when tilting the left analog up, you can't also tell it to face backward when tilting the left analog up in that same instance. It can only do one of those things at a time. If you try to force it by entering both in the document, the code will break and the game will display anomalous behavior as it tries to complete the conflicting commands. Some languages have safeguards in place that will result in the game not running at all [like Ren'Py] until you remove the paradox(es). The more advanced the AI, the more features and abilities you must add to it, and it all must be tied together in a way that produces to conflicts. To produce an AI, one must start with the most basic commands to achieve the minimal desired results. Then that person must add to it over time. In the end, he / she will end up with a tremendous amount of deeply layered code that's very difficult to sort through and interpret.
Things you might see in AI code blocks:
This character is an opponent
This character has a visual cone of 135 degrees
Attach this visual cone to the center of the front of this character head
This character has a visual range of 10 meters
When player enters the visual cone, move toward the player
Play the _suspicion_ animation
When this character is 5 meters from the player, play the _alert_ animation
At this distance, run toward the player
If the player increases the distance, continue walking
Then stop at each object on the path and play the _search_ animation
If the player becomes visible more than 5 meters away, jump to line 4
If the player becomes visible 5 meters away, jump to line 7
When the player is 1 meter away, play _attack1_ animation
If contact is made, continue with _attack1seq_ animation
Else continue with _attack2seq_ animation
If contact is made with _attack2seq_ animation, continue with _attack3seq_ animation
Else continue with _guard1_ animation
If player uses _attack1-1,_ _attack1-2,_ or _attack1-3_ during _guard1_ animation, maintain _guard1_ animation and ta don't decrease HP
Else continue with _dodge1_ animation and don't decrease HP
If player makes contact with _attack1-1,_ _attack1-2,_ _attack1-3,_ or _attack1-4_ before _guard1_ animation, continue with _stun1_ animation and decrease HP
Else continue with _counter1_ animation
If contact is made with _counter1_ animation, jump to line 14
If player's HP = 0, terminate
Else terminate when this character's HP = 0
Notice that there are no logical errors that would cause the system to end the sequence prematurely. Also notice that there is a designated way to end the sequence when a goal is accomplished. It's an algorithm. This is what goes into a simple AI. The more stats, animations, and unique characters included in the scene, the more complex and robust the code gets. That's not all. Above that would be the declarations, imports, sizes, positions, orientations, gravity, and states. You can add sound effects, visual effects, vocal tracks, more players, more characters, environmental animations, replacement environmental objects, overlays, system messages, captions, additional combat features with unique conditions, hit and stock counters, state changes, timers, filters, and even special items to that. The more detailed the combat experience, the more time, difficulty, and cost go into writing this code in a way that works optimally. Difficult and greedy programmers can make this an incredibly difficult task.
No, four weeks *is NOT* fast for what he's talking about. Fully flesh out my example with all of the enhancements I followed-up with, and *that* would take four weeks. That's only the *introduction* to *true* AI.
As an example something ive noticed in elden ring is that the enemy AI seems to target whoever does the most damage do it. And if youre using spirit summons your summon will come help you if you take a really heavy hit, disengaging whatever enemy they were already on. Struck me as an interesting part of AI I don't see in a lot of games and what Tim said about combat AI reminded me of it
I also experience the same thing he mentions in his 3rd story all the time. People think any sort of excited conversation is frightening or creating an uncomfortable scene. God forbid there's a friendly debate or everyone needs to go on stress leave for the next week.
The fact that they literally said it's scary cuz it sounds like mommy and daddy are having a fight is hysterical. That's the kind of thing you'd expect to hear from someone trying to make fun of them, FFS 😂
@@LeXofLeviafan Very childish to not see the adult truth behind the statement. If you're sounding like mommy and daddy arguing, you shouldnt be worried about who amongst the staff thinks you're mommy or who thinks you're daddy. Holy shit what a bad leader.
The truth is most likely that those people were so tired of hearing 2 grown men argue like children about a simple topic that they tried to say something that would stop the annoying shit while also not causing much more tension. But people breathe and live off their ego and cant think outside of their own illusions for 2 seconds.
@@FainTMako …You're talking about yourself, right? Because you're the one with an illusion you're projecting on others "because you have an adult truth to tell". (And projecting _hard_ , considering how you're ignoring the actual account of events entirely… or maybe you're simply one of those guys and are being defensive here - that's hardly any better though.)
The man in the video was pretty clear about it being simply a case of a discussion getting slightly louder than casual talk, and those snowflakes being unable to tolerate existence of that much sound in their general presence - note how _absolutely no one else_ had any issue with it for _three decades_ before those wusses started complaining (and others _still_ having no issue with it, it's only the new guys who were getting "triggered" at those discussions… and the "mommy-daddy" thing was their own words, which makes it pretty clear they've been coddled so much throughout their lives that their parents' marital arguments were literally their only exposure to humans talking louder than one would speak in a nursery).
@@FainTMako What's so tiring about hearing people talking about their *job* at *their* workplace?
@@FainTMakoGod forbid someone being passionate about something
Starfield getting a 10/10 from journalist was fucking hilarious to see. IGN with their 7 was the most accurate rating for that game, it was fun to read other journalists try to flame them for giving it a 7 instead of an 8-10.
5/10 should be the realistic number , 4/10 if youre not an BGS simp
@@user-vz4sh7sx1qI've seen quite a few comment sections praising Starfield, and it's just so disappointing to see. My hopes for Elder Scrolls 6 fades more and more when I see so many people satisfied with being fed the shit that is Starfield. I find it hard to believe that Bethesda is going to deliver a good product ever again when their fans are so happy eating feces.
Games been fun as fuck
@@femboyroxas yeah, please don't have any hope for es6 because it's going to hurt when it finally releases. just be glad we'll always have modded skyrim
There is nothing wrong with putting peoples names next to bugs. It doesn’t mean “this bug is your fault”, rather, it means “this bug is your responsibility to find a solution to”.
My company does it all the time. We come in, meet to discuss the work in progress, bugs, and things that will get started. If a bug happens, it is generally assigned to somebody who then is responsible to figuring it out. If they can’t for whatever reason (sick, in manager’s meetings, etc), we talk about who can help figure it out.
Then there is the problem of management - ever since Fortnite came out, every management group froths at the mouth over live-service. They’re more concerned about pushing a live-service game with a shop than they are concerned about putting out a good, complete game
Building systems for games is just simply not that hard, it's the kind of work that people who actually have the kind of mind that plays well with programming THRIVE off.
The problem with modern game development is that your programmers aren't cut out for the work, they just chase it because it looks approachable and pays well.
Never has there been so many programmers who don't want to write code. Games are glued together with shit other people have written, the people implementing it don't know how their own game actually works.