Martin, to answer your questions:
1) No, I wasn't really moving my arms around a lot. A little bit, but not too much. I was also standing up so I probably wasn't in the optimal position for minimizing tiredness. But I think I would have gotten tired playing that way after an hour.
2) I think it is somewhat safe to say that the hammer falls down and the utopian game dev companies can become hell holes. Two years ago, there was a big panel session at GDC on the quality of life for programmers. It was directly targeted at EA for the unfair treatment / expectation that programmers work far more than a good happy society should ask for. As a result, EA changed their policies. I'm not sure what changes they made exactly, but I do know that my friend at EA does not feel overly pressured. Raph Koster, the Creative Director for Sony Online Entertainment (and considered to be a visionary badass), once said that they expect their employees to get in sometime before 10 and leave by 7 (under normal dev circumstances) and that he feels everyone is at a good happy medium that way.
At PlayMotion, we face the same exact problem. The hammer certainly does fall and allnighters become a necessity sometimes. The fact is that it is very hard to schedule time accurately for something complicated like writing videogames. Even at ILM, I see a fair number of show-stopping bugs causing mayhem and sometimes allnighters. One thing that ILM does (and I'm pretty sure the MS Windows team does as well) which I think is neat is a nightly build with regression tests that run following the build. Everyone writes functions to (hopefully) test everything. So the day some code is committed whose testing functions run successfully but break someone else's tests, they know about it right then and there and take action immediately. Another thing about ILM that makes development harder than most software companies is that the users are sometimes using the build from the previous night in order to take advantage of a new feature. Production is the quality assurance department. That's kinda crazy!
1) No, I wasn't really moving my arms around a lot. A little bit, but not too much. I was also standing up so I probably wasn't in the optimal position for minimizing tiredness. But I think I would have gotten tired playing that way after an hour.
2) I think it is somewhat safe to say that the hammer falls down and the utopian game dev companies can become hell holes. Two years ago, there was a big panel session at GDC on the quality of life for programmers. It was directly targeted at EA for the unfair treatment / expectation that programmers work far more than a good happy society should ask for. As a result, EA changed their policies. I'm not sure what changes they made exactly, but I do know that my friend at EA does not feel overly pressured. Raph Koster, the Creative Director for Sony Online Entertainment (and considered to be a visionary badass), once said that they expect their employees to get in sometime before 10 and leave by 7 (under normal dev circumstances) and that he feels everyone is at a good happy medium that way.
At PlayMotion, we face the same exact problem. The hammer certainly does fall and allnighters become a necessity sometimes. The fact is that it is very hard to schedule time accurately for something complicated like writing videogames. Even at ILM, I see a fair number of show-stopping bugs causing mayhem and sometimes allnighters. One thing that ILM does (and I'm pretty sure the MS Windows team does as well) which I think is neat is a nightly build with regression tests that run following the build. Everyone writes functions to (hopefully) test everything. So the day some code is committed whose testing functions run successfully but break someone else's tests, they know about it right then and there and take action immediately. Another thing about ILM that makes development harder than most software companies is that the users are sometimes using the build from the previous night in order to take advantage of a new feature. Production is the quality assurance department. That's kinda crazy!
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