project management
Classic Pipeline Case Study Part II
This is Part II of the case study of Dark Angel’s (2002) Content Technical Pipeline. See Part I. I’ll continue from where we left off: 8. FMV Pipeline: Ah, FMV’s. More of the same here: naming conventions, and explanation about some intricate specific tool for video compression (this time...
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Classic Pipeline Case Study Part I
I was discussing some partnerships with www.gamedev.net, and someone brought up www.gamepitches.com. This site contains links to design documents, game pitches, etc. One of relevance is the Content/Art Pipeline for Radical Entertainment’s Dark Angel, released in 2002. I’m going to break down the design doc, all 125 pages of it,...
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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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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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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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Boyd’s Law of Iteration
If you haven’t read Jeff Atwood’s post on Boyd’s Law of Iteration, you should. The gist is, speed of iteration beats quality of iteration. We can sometimes have a very slow iteration time on the engineering team here, and our tools suffer. On the other hand, I think our...
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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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All About Documentation
There is a recent article on Gamasutra: Game Dev Collaboration: Google Docs Style. Every developer has his own story about the failures of documentation. I would have hoped that those thinking about this the most have already moved past the ‘silver bullet’ naiveté Chris shows in that article (well,...
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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...