It's really sad but the problem is also the consumers of these reviews. If they see anything that goes against the popular opinion, they rip the reviewer apart. Case and point look for any KZfaq video essay that says something like "maybe fallout New Vegas isn't the most bestest game ever made" and look at the dislikes and the amount of death threat in the comments

"nobody would read his review if it didn't echo the consensus" Strange since a bunch of channels on youtube popped up doingthe complete opposite of film mainstream film reviews.

We used to get validation from the people around us. Now we get it from masses of strangers clicking "like" online. Independent thought can't be sustained in that environment.

@@WayStedYouAnd then audience capture happens, and most of those channels can't afford to go against their audience and "counterculture" narrative.

It's called conformity, a favourite of the left ideology, which now has infected the totality of western culture!

same

Concurred!

Yeah that's why I'm here

act who? which video

same

bold to call a loading screen simulator with guns a game..

@satakrionkryptomortis people call those tiger electronic handhelds games too 🤷‍♂️ both still kinda suck tho

Skyrim also took zero risks and was a massive success

Precisely, they lack any professional MBA-havers.

Yes, but there's also plenty of indie games that just fail. You never see them because they suck. It's better for players to not design by committee, because as players we'd rather have 3 great games and 7 awful games, than 10 meh games. But I can see suits wanting to make a predictable profit. And plenty of players do buy those by-the-numbers games, so clearly there's a market for them. And I don't think you can really argue that Ubisoft tricks its players into buying yet another Ubisoft game -- people know what they're getting into, and yet many people apparently like a predictable by-the-numbers game.

Dude, he isn't talking about money. He is talking about how the industry are a bunch of lil bitches.

Indie games are still low budget and effort compared to company budget. Unreal engine makes the games itself. Nobody wants to program or fine tune anymore. They want the presets with no effort. Indie games do nothing new but copy and pasted old ideas to make money off of old fans. Souls-born games for example. Indies exists to make money off of old legacies and ideas. Pixel Art is absolute bloat to the indie industry. Woke workers and gamers are the problem as well.

​@@lightworker2956 Just like there are KZfaqrs that fail, artists that fail, musicians that fail, startup companies of any type that fail... Like you said, we'd rather have 3 great games and 7 awful games. And that is exactly how that happens, through indie devs. The thing about "by-the-numbers" games isn't that there's a market for them, it's that people give devs the benefit of the doubt to make a better game than last time, to have improved and taken into account criticism that has been shared quite clearly on the internet. And often times they make games with ideas and concepts that are amazing and that hold so much potential so people want those games to be good sooooo badly, but then get disappointed after having played it. So, it's not that there's a markets for those meh-games, but rather people want those AAA games to be good, and are willing to spend money to try and see for themselves.

Oh totally that happened to me in one job I had. All that “brainstorming” was was the boss rejecting people’s ideas and then making everyone clap for the boss’s idea.

True bro, people are afraid to lose their job if your boss is egoistic and cant take any ideas from the others. You will hear those good ideas in the smoking area 😂

I have been on brainstorming groups put together to think of solutions for what ever concerns the current admin has at the time. We would spend hours coming up with ideas, identifying problem areas, thinking of possible solutions and writing a formal report only to have everything we come up with dismissed in favor for what ever the admin had already planned. What many of us realized over time was those committees' purpose was never to come up with solutions, they existed to give legitimacy to decisions that had already been made and provide cover by sharing fault if something didn't work. Obviously this is a example of bad management and work environment, but employees can experience this a few times and it get to the point where they stop participating mentally. If they then work at a place that has a healthy environment they first have to overcome that impulse of not caring.

Yeah, unfortunately many bosses want yes-men. Which makes it the correct career move to be a yes-man yourself. Even if you don't have such a boss: if you volunteer an idea and it's stupid, you look stupid. If you volunteer an idea and it's great, it's not like there's a huge upside for you. It's not like you're getting a 10k bonus or something.

i'd say the company should help them overcome that unhealty impules they developed, and then keep nourish that passion they were able to take back, if multiple ppl witht hat mentality, creativity, passion and will work together to achieve the same common goal i'd say it becomes very unlikely for it to not be achieved or even surpassed in its expectations/initial plans.@@Valecan

It's for those reasons that I'm kinda scared what kind of work environment I'm gonna get in game dev when I get out of college.

@@coltonkearschner9593 Dont be a chump. Make sure if you work, that you own the fruits of your own labor.

@cartergabriel5949 for sure man. I will do my best and continue to develop my skills.

I get you, there are a lot of different work environments, and you will learn from all of them. Just be sure to prioritize your well-being before everything. Specially when you're young, you can quit and move to other companies. Also I'll stay open to Indie and AAA, to learn from everything. Just my 2 cents! @@coltonkearschner9593

The core idea and interactive gameplay are at the core of the game. AAA games are very cautious to take risks in altering the gaming experience (why fix it if it ain’t broken?). This is the reason 3A games get stale with each release. In an indie studio you can take risks, because the creators had a vision for it. They’ll want to take it all the way. However, after the core is done 3A studios have a lot more people to polish it into a shining turd, or diamond. Indie studios don’t get that luxury, it’s either about finding the right VFX / materials / modeler etc consultant, or go alone and “git good” at EVERY ASPECT OF VIDEO GAME MAKING. To sum it up: with any game, you either have a hit in the interactive gameplay (even if it sucks in the pro polish layer vfx animations motion tracking etc) which is programming or visual scripting. Or you don’t! You can polish the core to look good, but if the core is rotten good luck 🍀!! All the best mates!! Never say never ! That is when you should give up 🆙 n your dream of making games NEVER 🎉

Seems to me the video game industry is in need of a revolution. We still need games to be made and amazing ones at that.

I dont know a lot of dev studios but I would only consider working for DE and specifically on warframe.

I dont know a lot of dev studios but I would only consider working for DE and specifically on warframe.

It's not a problem with an anxious society. It's a problem with corporate demands. They want everything to be super duper absolutely perfectly profitable and infinitely profitable. This insanely unfair demand basically leads to a toxic environment that terrifies workers at every level.

@@natsume-hime2473 I think you might be one of the anxiety ridden. If the incentive is to make things profitable, people wouldn't feel comfortable wasting time and being cautious. It's actually really common to throw caution to the wind for the sake of profit. I think people are just avoiding negative attention for their mistakes. As industries mature, people are more concerned about the opinions of others than the results they get because their colleagues have developed strong opinions about how things should be done. But I'm just guessing.

@@brandonkellner4053 While there's some truth to what you say, that's not the biggest problem. The mass of people taking over running games companies, who are not from the games industry is actually a huge problem. Especially when they do things like exclusively promote yes men, take massive bonuses, and then lay off entire teams of dedicated developers. The end result is that and the drive for profits incentivizes ass kissing, over actually getting work done. Since if you don't kiss ass, you wind up fired for cause with a bad review from your former employer. Which can utterly ruin one's career.

Yeah, it's across US society. Pussification is the non-PC term. A term that proves itself, because that term will make the pussified uncomfortable and/or worry that it makes other people uncomfortable.

it's definitely driven by corporate leadership.

Even as someone who manages other people I see people on my team not taking risks I would’ve taken before being raised to management. Management can’t take all the blame on this one

True.

Im sure this can be unlearned by a new league of managers just firing you if you cant do a 45 min task your boss asks you to do until 4 weeks.

Risk taking is a cultural issue. Management sets the culture. If you want people to take risks, you have to make sure they know you're not going to rip them to shreds if they fuck up.

@@Deliriumend this guy in his work environment was way more lenient than he needed to be. His programmers threatened to leave over a whiteboard. He gave them 2 weeks on code that would take 45 mins. If it's a societal problem. Maybe our programmers are learning in college to put in minimal effort and glide through their salary.

But AAA still have the lion's share of the market, due to the fact they have the marketing power and ability to manipulate the hype machine. Look at Starfield, arguably Bethesda's weakest game so far, absolutely reeking of the 'development caution' problems discussed in this vid. But they a) are Bethesda and fanboys will always buy their product no matter what, b) they're owned by Microsoft, who can spend $millions in marketing and expertly generating hype.

@@paulw5039 at least starfield exposes who is a shill and who isnt, that game is just bad, everything wrong with fallout 4 but on steroids

@@cloudcity4194 say whatever you want, the game is objectively bad, no amount of liking it can change that, unless you like bad games, then its great

@@cloudcity4194 Found the Shill

​​@@DanT-dh8lzok, it has exposed all this... now what? this exact thing has happened a million times before and nothing has changed lmao

This same thought process feeds into all other industries too. As a freelancer the battle of ensuring you don't sell yourself short when estimating a project can make or break you 😂 as you say it can be difficult to account for the entire process accurately hence the padding of time 😅 😊

I second this. Not software development but mechanical engineering here. Especially in the early stages of design some parameters have been identified but more come to the surface as development progresses. Yet in a professional environment we like to assign time constraints as cost and lead time is something a customer is mostly concerned about. It can be a difficult process to keep a project contained in the early stages to ensure the solution that is being developed is worth pursuing.

the biggest problem is that a lot of us has been burnt by this same process. you can in meeting give optimist best case scenario estimate and insist that they are just that only for the counterpart to come at you later mad treating said estimate as a legally binding agreement under the worst possible conditions. they just remember the number you spewed not the context of it. I think it come down to knowing who you're interacting with, their background, level of technical awareness and their personality, which is harder in bigger companies. another thing that I noticed that produce this kind of frustration is 'leaky information middle men(s)', say a manager or product owner or other related roles who doesn't know which questions are worth asking, what's worth remembering and communicating and whats worth filtering. a lot of the time you'll find yourself saying that said project would be a lot faster it and better quality if you didn't have to go through them and just ask directly.

I regularly double or tripple estimates just to be on the save side :D

@@ive3336 yeah. which is why I thought you where supposed to always give your self more time than what you think you would need. But it seems like everyone in both of these comment sections want to do away with that advice. which seems dumb to me.

Scaling up properly is one of the hardest things to do.

You reminded me of something my father told me about management. He said "sometimes when you are in a leadership position it is more important that you make a decision than to make the "right" decision". His point being that you can't let mulling over a decision paralyze the team into inaction. This becomes even more important when time is a resource that you can run out of.

Reminds me of when I worked on a team project a few months ago in college for Game Design... I took on the role of team lead because nobody else wanted to. I hated it. They wanted to have at least one meeting a day to talk about our project and with 2 people not pulling their own weight or asking questions to clarify things, we almost didn't pass. I tried so hard to get people to speak up and share their thoughts and ideas, but they wouldn't. I had to reach out to our professor several times to step in because I didn't want to fail the class. But yeah, nobody wants to take risks, even when those risks are so small. It's like trying to get a child to eat vegetables, but these are adults. I don't get it.

@@Valecan I remember this from Band of Brothers, where a commanding officer got everyone killed not by making the wrong decision, but by making no decision - which was always worse than even the wrong decision

@@Araphex I was part of a group project in college, with 3 others. I dont rememver the 3rd bc they were so silent. The other two were young girls (kids, basically) while I was a fully grown adult. We decided collectively to meet after class every day, to work on the group project. The first two meetings were useless, got nowhere, and both girls just wanted to gossip and discuss girl talk. So I'd leave whenever they would start that, as I asked if were done. Then they assigned parts to the project. Then they said they were having a friday meeting at a fast food restaurant jn the evening. I told them I wasnt coming bc that was late notice and we already agreed to meet after class. The evening didnt work bc I was an adult with adult responsibilities like a Job in the evening. I already explaines that, when we agreed only to meet immediately after class when I had a free hour before my next course. They just got angry and accused me of being lazy and not caring about the project. They said something juvenile about how I essentially wasnt passionate about the project bc I would leave early every meeting (I didnt stay to listen to them talk about boys after they did so for 20 minutes each time and then said it's fine if I leave since we were done). I said I already did my written part we agreed on and submitted it to them already. They later said it was not correct bc they changed directions at the fast food meeting. I told them I was an adult and sent the professor an email. They threatened back they will also talk to him about me being a problem. The ironic part is the leader who was so nasty, didnt do any writing. They agreed with themselves that they would both do the presentation portion together, half and half, so me and the other did all the actual writing. Convenient laziness. Needless to say, the Professor was a 50 year old adult. Not an 18 to 20-something year old childish little girl. I just emailed him saying they, like teenagers, just walked to talk about guys they were dating, but I did my part. I explained the situation and their threats, in case they wanted to lie. Professor laughed at the situation and told me he understands, and to turn in what I had and do a presentation on it alone. Easiest A I ever made. No clue what they said, but I suspect he didnt favor the gossipping children who almost certainly lied to him. All I know is she was especially pissed bc the professor said she had to rewrite my portion (or else it's plagiarism) bc she told me she wasnt allowed to use my work and got angry she had to rewrite it bc I was such a dramatic problem. Hilarious! A lot of people dont want to pull their own weight or are so juvenile they act like children when you just want to put in your dues.

@@nowayjosedaniel that was a pleasant read, glad that justice was served that time.

it feels to me like a lot of people today are motivated by thinking they or their work has to be perfect. like there's a lot of pressure on people, and kids...

Well, I would say that "analysis paralysis" is not about this case. Here a manager comes up with an idea, explains it (it doesn't look like there was any discussion or analysis), and asks a random dev over their TL's head to implement it in the next several hours. I think paralysis is coming not from the dev in this case.

@@Erilis000”Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”

Players will absolutely accept less graphical assets. Look how hard battlebit is popping off. Most devs don't seem to have the ingenuity required to develop polished game mechanics that are required to succeed without graphics carrying incompetency.

To an extent yes, but keep in mind that you're probably comparing average games of today to the best games from the 90's / early 00's. After all, you're not even remembering an average game from 30 years ago, because why would you? If you compare the best games from the 90's to the best games of today, you might say "well Baldur's Gate 3 is an amazing game, we're not doing so bad."

I remember taking a look into the development cycles of some of my favourite games as a kid and being blown away compared to games today. For example, the original Ratchet and Clank went from pre-production to release in 20 months with a team of 40. Ratchet and Clank 2 had a 10 month development cycle where the team grew to 80 people.

You mean Rimworld?

@@hawtlava Dark Age of Camelot was created on a 4mil budget by 30 peoppe in 18 months, and it was a massive 3 realm 40 class MMO with PvE, PvP Battlegrounds, and epic innovative RvRvR on a massive world map.

Obviously, things shouldn't be this way, but I can definitely see how they could be, as someone who has worked in enterprise software development. I'm not saying all of this is accurate to the exact scenario, I wasn't there, but I can *imagine* how 4 weeks is reasonable. So, you're sitting on a long desk in an open office with a hundred other people. There's weeks, or even months of work scheduled for you and your team to work on, all carefully estimated, organized by "epic" in a tool like Jira. Every 2 weeks, a portion of that scheduled work is pulled in to the current "sprint", a 2-week time box which is meant to give development teams a regular cadence for work and reflection. It's the start of the week, a Sprint Goal has just been set, and you're working on your first task, an infrastructure change that's a blocker for 4 other tasks, meaning those other tasks can't be completed until your current task is completed, tested, integrated and deployed. Someone asks you to make this tiny little change to the code. It's trivial, like 10 lines of pseudocode, it's genuinely not too hard in a vacuum, but you can't start on it right away. If you abandon your current task, you'll be delaying not only your current task, but the 4 other tasks that depend on it. Even if that wasn't the case, the tasks in your sprint have been carefully calculated according to your team's "velocity" to perfectly fill that week, and so if you accept additional tasks, that's likely to cause your team to miss some tasks this sprint. This wouldn't be an issue, except that many companies shortsightedly tie employee and team performance, whether directly or indirectly, to your sprint metrics. Unless the product owner agrees to move some of the currently accepted tasks out of this 2-week sprint to make room, this task will have to wait 2 weeks until the next sprint, and get included then. So we're up to 2 weeks. Next, while the code is simple in theory. Add an entity ID to a table when damage is taken, or increment it's value if it's already there. But any programmer will tell you that even things that look simple can be quite difficult in a big codebase. There are things that are unclear, even with such a simple task. What counts as an entity for this purpose? If the character is damaged by a physics object, how do we know who threw it? If the character is damaged by part of the environment, should that be included as an aggro target? What about accidental friendly-fire? How is the initial target chosen when no damage has been taken? What happens if an entity that's currently in the map disappears or transforms, changing its ID? How do we prevent an enemy from trying to chase another entity on the other side of the world because they were damaged by them a while ago? Also there's the fact that Bill added a hack that treats health packs as entities which do -100 damage, meaning that it's hypothetically possible for an enemy to become aggroed onto a health pack. None of these are insurmountable problems, but they add up, so we need to discuss and properly specify this. Everyone's busy right now, but we'll bring it up at the sprint planning for the next sprint, and then discuss it over a couple of long, boring meetings. +3 days. Ok, now it's not as simple as just writing the 10 lines of code, and done. It needs to be integrated with the game engine itself. This table of entity IDs can be represented by a simple hashmap, which would work just fine, except that the player has the ability to quickload and save at any time. We need to make sure that this map of entity IDs is properly serialized and persisted to the save data, or when the player quickloads, every enemy will lose aggro. Could be +2 days if things are bad. We need to write automated tests for this stuff. Yes, it may just be "temporary", but any programmer knows that the venn diagram of "temporary" changes and things that become permanent parts of the codebase is a complete circle. So we need to give it the high level of code readability, quality and testing that we do for every piece of code. We write automated tests for the table itself, the way it integrates with the scene, the way it interacts with other AI rules, the way it's serialized and deserialized from the save data. Could be +2 days if things are bad. There could be more unknown unknowns, things we don't know about that make implementation more difficult, and I'd usually add some padding time for this. So the code is written, but now it needs to be reviewed by 2 teammates including one senior developer. It'll probably be at least a day before a reviewer even looks at your code (+1 day), and then they leave a comment asking you to change the name of some variable. You do so, but they don't check their emails and re-review the code for another day (+1 day). Then you go through the same thing with the senior developer reviewing your code. They're deep in a complex, fundamental change and can't shift focus, but on the next morning you receive an LGTM (+1 day). Then it goes through QA, which will probably take at least 2 days, probably more, even assuming there are no issues that require rework. Altogether, that adds up to 20 working days, or 4 weeks. Then the team lead has a discussion with the guy and agrees to throw other work out from the sprint and start on it right away, which removes the 2-week delay at the start, bringing it down to 2 weeks. Again, this isn't exactly what was happening in the real world case, I can't know, but in every large development company there's a process to follow, meant to ensure quality and reduce communication issues. Whenever there's a process to follow, every stage in that process introduces some level of delay. How do we get around this? Build small. Small teams can communicate effectively without too much process. Their members all understand the vision of what they're trying to do, so they don't need detailed specifications. A team member with a higher level of personal impact upon a project has a much greater investment in that project's quality and success, and they'll self-enforce quality without the need for a multi-stage review and QA process. Game development is cheaper and easier than it's ever been, and we need fun games made by smaller teams who can work in a truly agile way.

why are quality assurance the first to let go in companies? what specifically do you guys do ?

​@@shaggytoph as the game gets bigger, more variables to test, QA expands to meet the scope and timelines. When the game is shipped what do you do with maybe 100+ testers with nothing to test until the next game is far enough along. Ideally the studio or publisher has a pipeline where people can roll onto the next project but doesn't always work out that way. My recommendation for a career in QA is to expand your knowledge, always learn new areas, improve your tech skills and understanding and be able to pivot into different industries when needed. Games are a great area to get your skills up because they have so much to them so you can learn many domains but it's a tough place to maintain a career long term - pay and job security is much lower than other industries doing similar work.

Well said :)

Agreed.

Go play indie games then

This is just stupid.

@@SiborgGamersome are great, and many just use recycled assets from an engine’s digital store page. And it’s crazy because some of these are praised. Look at Tunic. Total rip-off in many ways from different games and gets tons of praise. So then the next indie dev will do the same thing

@@pt8292 lmao what? what's wrong with Tunic? why dismiss it as "a total rip-off" from other games? are Hollow knight or Blasphemous rip-offs too? how about something like Songs of Conquest? is that just a rip-off of Heros of Might and magic?

​@@SiborgGamerjust gotta find the right ones.

shitty games from a shitty time, you should really think about getting replacement contact lenses they seem to be rose-tinted just a smidge.

Unfortunately there's a lot fewer new ideas to do. Since around 2000 it was already hard to come up with a unique new concepts for games. 20years later and it's even harder. It's hard when you pitch what you think is a new idea, and it gets shot down with "[insert game] did that already."

@@renaigh People like you are as bad as people who complain that modern games suck compared to older games. There was plenty of trash to go around in every generation of gaming. If you think Typing of the Dead was "shitty" there's something wrong with your sense of fun. My typing speed is still really fast, because of that game. Since it was a good typing tutor that was addictively fun and hilarious in nature at the same time.

​@natsume-hime2473 originality is over rated imo. There hasn't been an original story since Gilgamesh, and even that's probably based on pre-existing oral storytelling. Just give me believable characters and a well told story and I'm happy. (This is coming from a writing perspective, not game dev)

Thanks for the reminder on Sacrifice. I have fond memories of muddling my adolescent self through that game and getting turbo stuck on the final level. I’d kill for a spiritual successor.

Unfortunately they're not unemployable because this is like the entire industry

managers should take risk and fire people who cant do the job

@@josephhetzenauer1890 it's the managers' faults that these people even exist. Try and excel in one of these situations and your most likely reward will be more work and responsibility, without a corresponding increase in pay (you only get that when you find a job somewhere else). The best programmers gtfo, and you are left with the mediocrities who don't mind having a soul sucking job working for idiots all day.

@@josephhetzenauer1890 missing the point. it's the managers who made that happen. the guy is saying the programmer can usually do the task in one day but sometimes it takes 2 instead. and when that happens the manager get's super upset thus causing the programmer to now mark all 1 day tasks as 2 day tasks. and then that continues until you have what should be a 1 day task turn into a 4 week task. stuff like this happens in retail too. or at least it did to me. i'd get told to do one thing then while doing that thing I'd get told to go do something else. then later get told off for not doing the original thing

​@@weirdo3116Lol I'm a brokie in retail and that happens every day.

This was my thought. Maybe the simple AI request itself wouldn't be much of a challenge, but with many other changes being worked on simultaneously, it adds a new whole set of logistical issues. If someone else is working on new AI moves, maybe the new AI breaks it, etc. Fallout 1 was made by 15 people, Outer Worlds by 80. If you want game development to be as fluid as before, maybe trim your staff. However, the lead programmer should be able to explain they why it would take 2 weeks...

@@fiskern2241I think that comes down to either one of two things: 1. He’s padding the time so he doesn’t have to do much work and is being called out on it so he can’t come up with a reason. 2. Younger people these days do not know how to communicate their needs and stick up for themselves therefore can’t explain why X can’t get done because of Y.

@@maxpain45678 You forgot 3. They actually do take 3 weeks for a 3 hour task because they are incompetent and dont actually know how to program. FizzBuzz is real.

they're pre-optimizing their work flow lol

What really gets me us how poor the lead programmer was at communicating on behalf on his subordinates to his manager. Beyond lacking communication skills, he was downright rude and antagonistic it appears ... at least as the story is remembered. But having had similar issues with managers in thr past, you tend to hold onto such things.

It is such a breath of fresh air to hear a competent, intelligent expert in the field talk about the problems of the industry. Everyone else is so scared or weak to be honest, that they pretend everything is great and every peer is a perfect, competent genius. I am so tired of the fake civility and the pretending the house being on fire means everything is fine.

Bingo!

That's why i think Nintendo is the company that suffers the least problems. At least since Iwata it is handled by old developers.

@@josedeleon1923 Take a look at how Mashiro Sakurai describes the role of video game director and his project management advice in general. I'm coming to realize it's all advice western game directors will really need.

Absolutely. I'm an engineering team lead and half of my job is just listening to the C-suite rant about features that we're missing or that don't do what they should, despite the fact that all we do is exactly what the C-suite tells us to do. So I give them bullshit estimates, we get the work done in half the time (if not less), and then when they reactively pivot to something else, we can redo it and still meet the original timeline. It's the stupidest game.

You work IN an engineer, How's that? Sounds fun

i long for the day i see a former Rockstar dev talk about game development there. haven't found anything. I did just watch former BGS devs talk about their work on Skyrim. Look up Skyrim Documentary Finally Awake

I would also love him to invite developers he shitted all over and let them say something. Just from his speech, I found way too many red flags. I have a feeling that HE was the main issue there.

@@RichardHoelscher Since you're clearly not in the industry (or new to it) - you already get that. Your portfolio allows you to negotiate more pay there or at your next job. When a project does well YOU do well too. Not being guarenteed a job is part of the industry because mobility is a PERK of the industry...

@@MrTickleTrunkwell can go both ways I see the point that was brought up a lot too with people not wanting their name listed since they can receive backlash for a poor project which id hope someone wouldn’t want to update their portfolio with. Tough industry working on eggshells

@@answering248 Not wanting your name on something means it's WAY too bad. But you can take that as a loss and move on to the next project... also that's only a concern on AAA projects - most of the industry is not large studios. They just make tentpole games...

@@RichardHoelscher This doesn't happen in tech, employees have a massive amount of bargaining power and mobility. It's standard to go interview at a different company, get an offer, and use it to demand a raise for your current job.

Been teaching for college for 20 years. Your insight into why the newbies might be afraid was thought provoking. It makes me question if our feelings first education system is actually making more resilient workers.

Also for the coding example, there are usually a lot of factors to consider, especially in bigger teams code structure needs to be unified so everyone is on the same page and not only one of the devs have a clue what the code is suppose to do and how it works. Thats why "i have done it in 45 minutes" might be true, but have you done it in a way that all other devs can work with it? is it documented so people know what it does when you leave the company? is it low enough stress on game performance? i really can see the frustration when you come from smaller teams, like "i just did it in the past and in an hour it was done", but if you have 100 devs on a project and everybody would just do what they want it would turn into chaos eventually. Thats why the indie sector will maintain to be THE space for new ideas. But also customers changed, nice game design is not what 90% of gamers actually want, they will buy the 100th COD or FIFA as long as presentation is top notch, try selliing slay the spire to to the masses. So tripple A in its current form means, big investment needs to make sure you get your money back, and since innovative game design is like bottom of the bucket for most customers, they leave that to the indie market and just take the ideas from them and put the money into presentation and accessability - So in the end it does not matter, there are games for everybody and new ideas will eventually reach even tripple a even though they where not created by them, but still there is plenty of innovation, plenty of good quality games, but you just have to pick where you are looking nowadays

@@dennisvogel5982 The example he gave though is so simple that it could definitely be done in a way usable by everyone in under an hour. It's: - add a data structure to the base AI entity - update it whenever the entity is attacked, referencing the attacking entity - sort and sample the list when choosing targets That's probably 15-30 lines max, depending on how you do the sorting. 45 minutes for this is completely fair for anyone on the team (I would've guessed 20 minutes). If you've written it before, it would be under 10. Maybe you could stretch it out to a day for someone completely unfamiliar with the code base and who's kinda bad at programming and who's distracted by a bunch of meetings throughout the day. 4 weeks is just inexcusably absurd. Anyone who takes that long on this should be fired. I also don't like that you brought up documentation as an element that would add a bunch of time for this task. The documentation for this isn't needed since any decent naming convention would immediately make it's use clear, and it's completely encapsulated by the AI entity. If it was needed for some reason that I'm missing, it would take 5 minutes.

@@La0bouchere its wasnt exactly for this specific case but in general a lot of work gets forgotten, when a statement is made "this will just take 5 minutes" - heard it a lot, while working in the industry and its 99% of the time not true. When doing prototyping and stuff like that, it might be true but once you are reaching 50 or more people working on a project you cannot just simply "code something" What if that specific call you want to just dump a lot of data into, several weeks in the future is designated to be limited - for example only every second hits get checked, instead of every individual hit ..... suddenly parameters changed and stuff stops working - maybe because the call itself was designed to be changeable in that way, did mister "it takes 5 minutes" check with the departments? usually he has not, so now you have to write a whole new call to dump the code into -.... and this might not be your decision but another department has to make that -suddenly you doubled the calls for each hit - is that sustainable from the server architechture? - this is a bad but kind of pratical example why you do not just code something. - So if you are in the end responsible for delivering on time, you check for everything that could happen and make sure it does not go wrong because in the end it is your responsibility to give estimates that work. if its quicker, and you have time left, nice - but there is nothing worse for planning than give estimates that are too low. in the end the situation is as follows - if you say 4 weeks and do it in 5 minutes everything is fine - when you say 5 minutes and need 4 weeks you have to explain a whole lot or might lose your job in the worst case, because that guy that wanted to work with your code now cannot - setting off a chain reaction, that might even shift release dates blowing millions of marketing budget. That is simply not the case when you are 3 dudes in a garage and you are the dude that codes 90% of the game - you know the code, you are the only one that NEEDS to know the code, you have a good enough grasp what and why this call exists and if anything is planned to do with it in the future. There is no other developer waiting on your code. You have not planned 3 years ahead with user story after user story that each have estimates and depend on each other. you do not have billboards on time square rented for your release date. You have not rented hollywood superstars to be in your tv commercials..... i could write another book about documentation, but believe me, its needed - so i leave it be at this point. i know what he wants to say and yes its frustrating - you can prototype a running game in a few days with all gameplay relevant systems running these days - but once it gets to production stuff slows down, doubeling team size will only give you about 50% faster production a lot of times but its needed to handle the sheer size of games nowadays. then everything needs to be documented and coded in a way that its easy to handle because live service and patches are the norm. its not commom practice to do things that way because nobody wants to work - its the procedure everybody comes back to after a lot of different approaches failed and i know that from experience

" It's too unique and risky, we're doing a game for the mass audience " There it is, the one thing about triple AAA video game developer and publisher that always self destruct itself every damn time, the mass audience goal, they never work and they never learn. 😑

Another difficulty is when black box rules make the bit of code you need to work with hard to access in the new place you want to access it. So like if the Npc aggro list isn't visible to those callbacks yet, then you need to file back up the chain and see where you can inject Aggro-list data - somehow get access to the data in a safe manner, so you can use it in the new location. And that can be a tough restructure if the data isn't already provided.

No wonder all AAA games are trash. All the devs are fucking lazy and take season to fix small bugs

Hmm... How exactly did Agile make things worse? Just curious. It's the first time ever I've heard someone saying something like that.

The issue that comes often as the source as why people in a dev team want to do right in such a solid way is from the inability for the team members to segment and extract their work from the project's scope and state. With you example of a sketch of a sketch of a feature, one way of allowing someone to do it right and not too over-the-top-perfect is to request the feature outside of its intended scope. Like requesting that feature to be drawn on a white board without it referring to anything currently in the project. To give somewhat of an example, if you were working on a game that has zombie, if you were to ask a sketch of a sketch of a how the zombie could be generated dynamically when nothing has been done with the zombie and their animation/AI, you would get as many opinion/solution as there are people understanding various point from the game development. If you were to ask the same question when the game actually have zombies in it, you would get many suggestion that would surround what's already build/applied because of the negative aspect that comes from the idea of scrapping what has already been done. Another issue often comes from the education received. Back in the 90's and early 2000's, programming classes were mostly following general conventions/languages that weren't directed toward the gaming industry so anyone had to push and learn the trade and develop their creativity through tries and errors. Then as the video game becomes more popular and more companies start looking for new hires, school started to teach game dev-focused courses with the same structure as the general convention/language course which doesn't give much liberty nor attempts at trials & errors. Teachers teaches and students learns what's taught and that's it. Once the student graduate and is released in the wild, he or she has little to no time to have fun trying and immediately turn to "do perfect first" mode as it was taught at school. (At school, being creative and not following convention/perfectionism results in low score and failure.)

I might be biased here, but damn! S.T.A.L.K.E.R has a lot of jenk but it was so risky at the same time that it created a very unique game with a lot of charm and atmosphere, and I love it for that exact same reason!

People call it jank to shrink responsibility of the product being trash. Starfield is a perfect example, can't go 15minutes without jank breaking my immersion. Jank is acceptable for indie games, not triple A games.

Playing lots of Indie games, love em. Very few AAA title seem worth the time. It's the weirdness, quirks, and jank that intrigue me.

I'd offer that there's a difference between jank broken and buggy. Starfield is more broken or buggy game design. Flying into a planet not doing anything, or merchant inventories being tied to a chest that's hidden somewhere in the world are incomplete design that shouldn't be happening. Like someone asking for a proper vendor system which would take 45 minutes and someone telling them it will take 4 weeks, so they do the workaround instead because the world designers gotta keep going. Neither of them care that people will find it and laugh. They gotta keep trudging along. Jank would be the physics engine in Zelda BotW. It has to work that way for the trials to function. Side effect is that sometimes it can be manipulated to do silly things outside of that confined space. The techniques used in Mario speedrunning can be considered jank. But overall I'd say the more determining factor between jank and broken is whether it's viewed positively/amusing or not by the person playing. @@Wizardi1111

One big issue with the VR market is that VR headset manufacturers are trying to create walled gardens in a very niche market. Platform exclusivity only hurts VR.

Is this the experience you are having? Like you are lazy, incompetent, and overestimate efforts? Really?

Naw, but i'm sure you got a great view of everything with no window to look through@@SergeDuka

That's the best part of engineering, there are multiple ways to tackle a problem. Of course, later down the line you'll look at what you wrote and be kicking yourself at how badly designed it is, but that's apart from the point. if you get it working, who cares, you'll make better stuff later. The way I learned to code is for about a decade or so, I shut out the world and everybody's 'best coding practices this' and 'best coding practices that' etc..., and just made a few games, and one bigger one over the years. Later on, the best practices came to me as I just figured it out myself, and it was personally way funner that way, but it was more so "I want the computer to do this" and then looking up guide after guide online and forums and reading how to do things. The blank slate you can look at is insanely inspiring, you can make ANYTHING, literally anything happen in the virtual world. It's more addictive than the most addictive MMO.

@@astrahcat1212 This is almost exactly the comment I needed to know I wasn't just mistakenly presuming what I thought about it. Just trying and getting something out there to then change, or toss out as I make better, and I'll get better because I'll have experience as my teacher and I'll be sure to make lots of mistakes to learn from.

I've made my own game too, plus doing some online programming courses.

Big compagny like gouvernement

Its not really size, it's whether the company is managed by the founder or not. The big game companies in 2000-2010 were still being run by the founders. After that they switched to professional managers. A good counterexample is Tesla, massive company, public, but still extremely efficient and actually capable when it comes to what it's trying to do.

"If the amount of programmers doubles every N years, then at any time half of all programmers have less than N years of experience." And it doubled frequently over the past couple decades!

Found the Scrum Master :D

hehehe, those lazy devs should be greateful they have a chance working with you. They may have this delusion that the company is lucky to have them, but in fact it's the other way around. 40 hours work week? Away with that leftist nonesense.

@@an_imminence Well, that's because 'the barrier of entry is lower!' but that isn't the case if you specialize in a skill, for example GPU programming and architecture, C, C++, or hey assembly or something and take a year to learn the really difficult math and processes, or just in general the stuff that people are afraid to learn. The more difficult it's perceived to be, the less saturation there is in general.

To quote Office Space, "That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled." The only reward for working quickly and efficiently is more work. When you have to move job to job to get a decent raise, why be a try hard?

Of course. Corporations have KPIs, metrics, performance reviews, and all sorts of stuff. If you aren't cautious enough, they'll fire you in no time. On the other hand, you can take pretty much any risk in a start-up because the entire thing is already a huge risk. Plus, everyone around will have your back.

Don't follow the crowd today. Work hard, put up with the bs you get at every job and you'll flourish. Goodluck!

That's what we-devs all tend to do. Not what Tim says.

What do they do most of the day? They dont work. Capitalists exploit workers to the point of having slavery without the costs of slavery. So whenever wage slaves can, they fight back. Programmers are high skill jobs who work under people who have no clue about what programming is or how it's done. Essentially theyre magicians to these people. Since they are expensive to replace, the programmers can fight back against wage slavery by pretending to work 90% of the time. They probably literally play WoW, surf reddit/tiktok, and watch porn most of the work day. Theyre smart enough to hack and work aroubd any monitoring, if even monitored. All wage slaves do this to some extent if they can. White collar office jobs pushing paperwork is all about slacking off in the morning, doing a little work, then slacking off the remainder of the day - especially the last few hours before clocking out. Those who cant cheeze the system are considered to have brutal jobs where they are treated like animals. That's because they are. Everyone else cheezes their way to sanity and a more realistic work day of 2-4 hrs of actual work and the rest looking busy. Remember Minesweeper?

No field of journalism has ever been 100% unfailing squeaky-clean.

Game journalism is a joke. You assign some old fart to review the game in a week. He has to finish the game in 5 workdays, 'cause, they got to burp it out by release date. It was assigned to him, it's not the genre he likes. Imagine a review of something like Kenshi or Star Sector from a person like that. There is a video on KZfaq by WelfareWalrus proving systematic bias in game reviews with data.

​@@katamarankatamaranovich9986Aside from all the generalizations treating worst case scenarios as the norm, I think I should point out that you're conflating journalism with criticism.

Dem, time flies

@@JediMB Why make a well reasoned and and nuanced point? When it's easier to get internet points for throwing around spurious accusations and unfair generalizations! As cynical as I'm being here, that's most of internet discourse anymore and it's bleeding into the real world with culture wars being fueled by internet lies taken as fact. When it comes to gaming this results in a small group of rabid fans and politically motivated wankers shouting down all valid criticisms of games. Just look at what routinely happens to Stephanie Sterling over on The Jimqusition. Or how a large portion of Yahtzee's fan base has turned on him and now engage with his reviews purely to attack his character.

There's a lot of good books on game programming. It doesnt even matter the age, either. I took a DirectX 7.0 isometric game programming book, ignored the DirectX half and then ported the Isometric half over to SDL. Worked fine and taught me how to make an isometric game engine. I took a C++ game institute course (2 college level books) to initially learn to program, and it was great. After that, the above isometric book and then a Novice/Intermediate book all the reviews said was too advanced for newbies. Perfect for a level up into novice-hood. Gamedev with SFML, which included C++11, Multithreading, and Multiplayer. Took me 9 hrs to go through that book and I ended up learning how to make my own game engine that rivaled Unity for 2D. So really...just grab a few books and try to port them over to whatever language you want to use or whatever game framework you like. Just avoid engines like Unity. They will hurt you if you want to become a game programmer. Work with game frameworks or even lower level.

As a software developer of many years, I'd like to point out that there is some nuance to this. While you definitely want to be able to deliver something instead of endlessly iterate over the same piece of code, you also don't want to necessarily deliver something that "just works" in the least amount of possible time. There is a balance to be struck. You do want to try and make your code, uh, "good looking" as you put it. I'd rather call it readable, scalable and maintanable. However, going off of Tim's story, it's also important to understand what the goal is for the code you're writing - in his example it was supposed to be a quick poc to test other things out and not necessarily production ready code, so you might be ok spending way less time iterating than you normally would, as you are sure to come back to that funcitonality and improve it later.

​​@@fabiodafontourabeltrao7351It isnt a hard concept. You write good code anytime you write real (permanent) code, but you don't reiterate over it more than once. You move on. It really is that simple: Write good code once then let it go.

I think it depends on the goal of the boundary push.