Culture
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.
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Augmented Coding
First, a shout-out for the inspiration for this post: Patrick Smacchia and the NDepend developers have given me my first free software license as a result of this blog. NDepend is a pretty awesome static code analysis tool. You can find more info here: http://www.ndepend.com/Features.aspx NDepend, or any static code...
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GDC Slides/Notes online: Ending the Culture War
I’ve uploaded my GDC slides (with full notes/narration). Here’s the link: Rob Galanakis: Ending the Culture War, GDC 2011 TA Bootcamp (PDF slides/notes) The main point of the presentation is understanding how to get your Tech Art and Tools Engineering teams to work together effectively (and why they aren’t...
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SmartBear’s Code Collaborator for Code Reviews
We’ve been using SmartBear’s Code Collaborator at BWA on the engineering side for a few months and I think it has worked out real well. I recently forced it upon Tech Art and we’re seeing immediate gains and I’d highly recommend the product. The big problem we had (on...
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I can’t believe you still manage assets with folders and names
I thought this strategy had gone the way of the dodo, but apparently not. There are still people using folders and filenames to manage assets, which is expected, but worse is that there are still people suggesting folders and filenames as a solution to asset management. It is difficult...
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Fighting the tyranny of tools design
At our studio, the lead game designers are also the ones that decide workflows and design tools for the rest of the design team. However, there’s nothing that says good game designers are good tools designers (I’ll talk about this in a future post, and it may be that...
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Education vs. Technology
I was listening to NPR a couple weeks ago and there was a story about this school in Tanzania that had lots of speeding traffic in front of it and a dozen or two children were being hit every year. Apparently, the government had repaved the road in front...
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The Development Isolation Layer
Joel Spolsky over at Joel on Software has an excellent article from 2006, called “The Development Abstraction Layer.” The gist of it is that, developers must be abstracted from the distractions of business. Management’s primary responsibility to create the illusion that a software company can be run by writing...
