Archive for May, 2011
Documentation is a tech possibility, not a project management hurdle
Months ago I made a post entitled “All About Documentation.” In it, I discussed how in order to solve the documentation problem, we needed to either give up entirely, or make a serious attempt at solving it. I mentioned I had some tech in the works, and Hamish McKenzie...
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The Exception Bogeyman
I recently ran across a post by my colleague Chad Stewart, Lead Dev Support Engineer at BioWare Austin: Try/catch control flow First of all, you ought to know that exceptions are deliberately named. That is to say, they are reserved for exceptional cases. … try { this.SomeRiskyOperation(someParam, someLocal, -1); }...
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Game designers vs. Tools designers
(I wrote this post in November 2010 and it was an important influence for my GDC2011 talk. I’m finally posting it. See the GDC slides/notes for much deeper discussion). There’s a problem at many studios, I think, where our lead game designers are also responsible for designing tools and...
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Relationship between PMs and Dev happiness
Consider this thought: As the ratio of Project Managers to Developers increases, the happiness of Project Managers generally rises and the happiness of the Developers generally decreases.
