Interesting Links for 08-12-2020
Dec. 8th, 2020 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Driverless taxi rides are rolling out slowly. Very slowly
- (tags:cars automation taxi )
- We still don't know that quantum physics "means". That may never change.
- (tags:physics knowledge philosophy failure )
- The Secret To The Success Of Bastion, Pyre, And Hades: No Forced Crunch, Yes Forced Vacations
- (tags:work working_hours games )
- A classic SF short story about the future of vat grown food
- (tags:food scifi ArthurCClarke )
- Unidentified illness hospitalizes more than 300 people in India
- (tags:India disease )
- The trailer for the Colonel Sanders movie is just amazing
- (tags:movies chicken trailer kfc wtf )
- So you want a career in computer games tournaments?
- Did you know the computer games business is bigger than film, TV and music combined?
(tags:games education ) - British celebrity chefs as Greek gods
- https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1335584701965332481.html
- Cyberpunk 2077 is basically designed to trigger epilepsy
- (tags:games brain disability OhForFucksSake )
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Date: 2020-12-08 02:18 pm (UTC)Not sure where I would actually put those three or who would take their places.
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Date: 2020-12-08 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-08 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-08 03:10 pm (UTC)The Secret To The Success Of Bastion, Pyre, And Hades: No Forced Crunch, Yes Forced Vacations
Date: 2020-12-17 07:16 pm (UTC)Good to see people learning those lessons. We came to many of the same conclusions after the death of Looking Glass Studios: a bunch of us wound up creating a tiny company called Buzzpad, which was built around the then-nascent concept of "Extreme Programming" (which would later get corrupted into Scrum). The high concept was very much, "Okay, we're all burnt-out. How do we make a company that doesn't do that to us?" Sustainability was the name of the game.
Great little company: fun to work at, hugely productive, overall fabulous. Its only problem was bad timing -- we were ready for our exit-from-startup in early 2002, at the height of the Internet Nuclear Winter, which drove us out of business just when we thought we were all set...
Re: The Secret To The Success Of Bastion, Pyre, And Hades: No Forced Crunch, Yes Forced Vacations
Date: 2020-12-18 02:19 pm (UTC)Also - I didn't know you worked at Looking Glass. That's pretty cool. (Although I know the games industry chews people up and spits them out.)
Re: The Secret To The Success Of Bastion, Pyre, And Hades: No Forced Crunch, Yes Forced Vacations
Date: 2020-12-19 01:20 am (UTC)Thanks! I was there for the last couple of years -- worked on Thief and System Shock II.
To be fair, LG was way better than many of the horror stories I've heard about: a lot of great camaraderie, amazing technical talent, and a general sense of fun. They did care about folks' needs, and understood how tough long crunch periods are: after Shock shipped, everyone was basically ordered to take several weeks off (on the company) to recover.
But the top-level facts of the industry, especially at the big publishers, are insane -- the way that ship dates are set years in advance, with millions of dollars depending on hitting those dates, demos locking you into features early and no room for anything other than perfection. It's a terrible environment for sane software development.
We were starting to explore Extreme Programming in the late days of LG (about 20 years ago), but it's hard to push back against all those forces. Good to see folks standing up and doing so...