Every week, I have to use six different Office Software Suites:
As an expert computer user (former SysAdmin), I’m often asked for help by people with non-computing backgrounds. When they see how many different suites I’m using, they’re … surprised, to say the least. Here’s a quick snapshot of what and why.
Six months ago I tweeted a handful of obvious ways that you could make the Unity Asset Store greatly more profitable.
One of the Unity folk reached out to me, claimed that Unity was highly invested in improving this and asked for specific suggestions. So I wrote longer, detailed versions of each tweet and emailed them.
It’s been six months. No response. So … for Unity’s competitors, maybe looking to make/improve their own Asset Stores (or newcomers hoping to unseat the incumbents), here’s six obvious commercial improvements.
I’ve cut a few paragraphs I wrote to Unity about who I think their 3 main audiences are on the Asset Store; I included them as a “here are the assumptions I’m making” – I have no idea what their real audiences are. So I omitted that here.
NB: I’ve made the formatting webpage friendly, added some details, but this is essentially an info dump. I was too busy at the time to sugar-coat it – I figured that if Unity wanted to talk, I’d talk to them, and in person I’m really quite friendly and gentle. But at the time we were working 24/7 getting ready for a major exhibition, so this is a bit … terse.
This week I’m paralysed on some of my simplest decisions while happily making complex decisions quickly, and being incisive and highly effective on others. This problem occasionally crops up in my work and personal life, and it frustrates the hell out of me; I’m going to write about it here, see if it helps me find a new way forwards. Hopefully this may also help others who’ve experienced a similar problem in their own lives.
5 years as an iOS developer has pushed me to understand and improve my product/physical/functional design skills. Especially “industrial” design – problems and solutions.
Here’s a great one I saw the other day: combining a Snellen Chart with Stopping Distances, i.e.:
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+ |  |
The status quo on driving “too close for safety” is provocative, antagonistic. Have a look at a search for eBay: “too close bumper sticker”:
There’s a couple of major problems with this:
But combining the charts above, we get…
A plate you attach to your vehicle that informs the viewer how much too close/far they are right now, using a dynamic scale:
I couldn’t get a close enough photo to show it clearly, so here’s my redrawing of what the plate looked like:
Warning: principled rant against sloppy design and bad coding about to start; kids these days! Get off my lawn!
There’s a terrible disease affecting modern web developers – Twitter.com has just fallen ill with it, and it could be a long time before they cure themselves.
Deleting all images, and replacing them with the dreaded “web font”.
It’s the wrong solution for the problem, it doesn’t do what you think it does, and it pisses all over some of the Web’s core principles. If you’re a web developer, and you respect your craft, you shouldn’t even consider this, not for one moment. Here, for instance, is how Twitter currently looks for me – ugly, and very hard to use!
GitHub was another recent victim of this disease. They’re still in recovery, but they at least made their site “slightly usable” by adding tooltips:
What’s going on?
Core Web principle:
Information is everything; presentation is optional. It’s acceptable to forego presentation, so long as everyone can access the information.
Effect: When you load a webpage, your browser requests every image separately. This is a long way short of the “most optimal” code implementation.
Is this a big problem? For most of us … Not really. The system works, it’s flexible, it’s powerful – it’s a little inefficient, but for the corporations that care there are plenty of hacks and optimizations they can deploy.
Most artists should be creating Vector images most of the time, but the software vendors who made the editing tools for Vectors … all died out around 15 years ago. Back then, the advantages of Vectors were small, because most screens were low res.
We still haven’t recovered. There are many standards for bitmap image files, and two very popular ones – PNG, JPG. There are many standards for vector image files, but no popular ones.
Effect: web developers end up looking to Web Fonts as a de facto “vector image” standard.
There is an official Web/HTML approved vector standard – SVG – in wide use, with strong support in all current browsers.
Does it work? Let’s see (http://caniuse.com/svg) …
… but many software companies ignore it. For instance, Apple allows programmers to use both PNG and JPG (why?) in core iOS, but not SVG (despite having a full SVG parser built-in to their web browser). Many programmers I speak to believe that SVG isn’t supported at all – FUD wins again.
A core principle of the Web is that information is accurately described (the M in HTML). A recent trend in web development is “progressive enhancement”.
def. “Progressive Enhancement HTML”: a webpage written the way you were supposed to write it, instead of being hacked-together by unskilled monkeys
HTML has always been “progressive” – this was a core principle 20 years ago. But HTML was so easy to use and abuse that many of us (most of us? nearly all of us?) have been writing poor HTML most of that time. Shame on us (shame on me, certainly – been there, done that :( ).
But … the key point here is: Progressive Enhancement isn’t an “optional extra”, it is the Web. If you fight PE, you’re fighting the entire web infrastructure – and we know how that war will end.
So, when you remove an “image” and put a “web font letter” there instead, and change that letter so that the font contains an image you wanted …
…your HTML is now a lie.
Maybe you’re the kind of web developer who scorns blind people (and partially blind), who ignores the Internationalization features of software. You laugh in the face of Accessibility Standards, so you can reduce development time.
But HTML doesn’t make these things optional. They are so core to HTML that they are “always on”, even if you personally never use (need) them. One of the beautiful features of HTML is that if you do nothing, most of the Accessibility is automatically done for you.
With HTML, you have to go out of your way to prevent Accessibility. For instance: replacing images with magic-letters from a magic font.
The thing about custom Web Fonts is … the user can disable them.
Again, this is fundamental to the web. Partly for the Accessibility issue (who are you to decide which users require Accessibility? No. It’s for the user to decide).
But also to support the web principles of openness, and user-control (not corporation-control). My machine, my browser, my choice.
Just as you cannot prevent users from hitting the “View -> Zoom” menu option and making your web page take more or fewer pixels on their screen (I’ve worked with web designers – mostly ex-print designers – who HATED this, and felt it was a feature that should be banned) … you cannot force a crappy font on the user.
Information is everything; presentation is optional. It’s acceptable to forego presentation, so long as everyone can access the information.
In my case: I have a MacBook Air. While wonderful in many ways, they have tiny (11″), non-retina screens, and they’re laptops – so the screen is often further away than I’d like. When WebFonts came to CSS, a lot of the websites I use (art sites, design agencies) started using “beautiful but TINY” fonts that were unreadable. Game Studios still do this today, sadly – lots of hard-to-read but “edgy!” fonts and bad colour choices.
Sometimes, the only way I can do my day to day work is to disable the crappy 3rd party fonts.
SVG says “Hi!”. Think about it.
Step 1: Do not buy the book with this title.
Writing a book is tough, and I respect the time and effort that goes into it. But I don’t rate a book highly simply because it was hard to write: it has to fulfil it’s purpose, and help the reader. Some books are so poor they actively hinder the reader.
This one is being marketed to bloggers to promote it (for cash) without reading it. This (no review copies) might be a beginner’s mistake. I hope so; the alternative is horribly cynical.
For bonus points, the email was sent from a bouncing email address. If you want a job in the games industry, you probably don’t want to be advised by someone so careless/clueless they send out emails from broken email accounts.
That annoyed me enough to look through the marketing materials for this book, and it seems weak.
The author does not appear to have been a recruiter, nor a hiring manager, and apparently has never run a studio. If you read a book on this topic – make sure the author has spent years recruiting, hiring, and managing people in the industry. That’s the core expertise you want from the author – if they don’t have it, they need a really good excuse.
Further, the title seems deliberately misleading – linkbait for readers. It’s titled “become a game designer” but the content appears to be “get a job, somehow, doing something – anything you can scrape-by on – in the games industry”. Core topics are missing from those listed – e.g. how to advance your skills as a game-designer (key to getting hired!), etc.
…but I haven’t read the book, so I can only give vague suggestions and guesses at what it contains.
Personally I’d steer clear of all such books, and spend the time entering Game Jams instead. Every jam you enter will teach you more, and give you more experience that’s directly exciting to hiring managers, than reading books like this one.
I have classes of teenagers making their own games with little or no help; if they can do it, why can’t you?
I was asked this recently in private mail by someone heading off to University / College. For people choosing between a Computer Science/Software Engineering course vs. a Game Design / Game Development course, I’d said:
If you love games, you’ll do both anyway; one you’ll learn in lectures, the other you’ll self-teach. Which will you find easier to self-teach (given no-one is prodding you), and which will you need the extra benefit of having a formal course/teaching/teachers? (usually: people find it easier to self-teach “designing and making my own game experiments”. Usually, people find formal Computer Science / Maths is ‘hard’, and they need the help of a formal course)
Gross generalization: Most game-developers in the indie community are programmers; most of them are programmer-centric when looking at the world. I’m a programmer, but I’ve done approx 40% of my career in project-management and studio management (and even a tiny bit of publishing) over the years.
There’s one interesting point I want to clarify a little: By “indie community” I mean “focussing on the places filled with people who actually ship games”. Most game designers who want to make their own stuff have to learn programming, even if they’re 100% non-programmers, since it’s the only way to get “your” vision launched. Even the ones that started-off as pure artists often end up being highly technical (whether they admit that to themselves or not).
So … this is not a popular view, but I think it’s more accurate than most: by the time you finish a 3-4 year course starting “today” … C++ won’t be the game-dev language people care about. Already, for entry-level jobs most studios are more interested in “how good are you at Unity? How good’s your C#?”. That trend will only continue/increase.
Let’s be honest: many games-industry teams/studios abuse Scrum. Then, after months of pain and suffering (and poor project-progress), the team members go to other teams or companies, and take a hatred of Scrum/Agile with them.
So it’s interesting to hear from people who’ve made the transition from “Agile/Scrum done wrong” to “Agile/Scrum done right”.
Quotes I’ve heard repeatedly:
This came up on a forum today, and one of the posters chimed-in with their own experiences. The forum’s private, so I can’t link to it, but I’m reposting their summary (with permission):
“I’ve done scrum/agile 4 times in games.
Work does 3 week sprints and is now split into 2 teams so we have 2 scrums a day. Time of this is strict, on-time and 15 mins long*.
Our Producer/Product Manager only sees the program in the Sprint meeting. The entire team is in the Sprint meeting also, which is now pretty good. The Sprint meeting lasts the whole day. So that’s 6-8 hours every 3 weeks*.
The morning is broken into what we did in the previous Sprint. We demonstrate each story and if we tick all the requirements defined in the story it gets marked as complete. If we don’t complete it, we say why and a new story gets made with what’s left. This is only if it is still required and may be put into the Backlog and done several Sprints later.
The afternoon is spent deciding on the next stories. These have been defined by: the Customer Requirements/Publisher/Whatever, the Producer and the Leads. The 2 teams break off and the whole of that team decides the requirements AND the time it will take. This prevents the wasters on the team getting away with poorly defined requirements and giving a time that is clearly taking the piss*. It also covers people underestimating. The peer-pressure means people work because next Sprint people have to explain why it wasn’t finished when everyone decided on it. If no one can decide on the time then it clearly hasn’t been defined well enough*. It helps because the team works closely together and they all understand those parts.
We can ask the Product Manager questions at any time etc, but like I said: he never sees the work in progress for 3 weeks. He also never comes in and changes things*. Because it’s the whole team plus the Producer/Product Manager agreeing on things, features gets dropped when needed, priorities get sorted, and blame can be removed from the development cycle*.
There are various other small details but that’s the main bit of it.
If you aren’t doing these things in scrum/agile then really you’re just wasting people’s time and giving waterfall development the wrong name.
* All stuff Game Development scrum failed to do in my experience.”
(from 1982. Blogged now because … the named individual who apparently came up with this scam)
(for those that haven’t been following: four years after Langdell tried to bully an award-winning iPhone game into giving him their money, using his invalid trademark to threaten legal action … the USPTO has finally started cancelling each of his trademarks. Trademark law is FUBAR: 4 years for a fraudulent(*) TM to be cancelled? Ouch.)
(*) – my opinion, but: read the case notes … he apparently committed blatant fraud to keep-alive a trademark that legally had already expired
Last year, Pearson ran the first ever Innov8 competition, giving tech startups a chance to make their own innovative new product/project. The grand prize was £5,000 towards building the product.
Most of the teams were adults (even: real companies), but a team of students from Blatchington Mill School won, with their idea for an iPhone/iPad app: “My Science Lab”.
The three students named themselves “Quantum Games”: Jon, Nick, and Oli. All three of them have been studying for their GCSE’s in parallel with this project.
They’ve been supported by Mark Leighton, Assistant Head / ICT Director at the school.
For mentoring and game-development expertise, they had me – Adam Martin – previously CTO at MindCandy and NCsoft Europe, now an iPhone/Android developer
The students chose to focus on a game that would help other students revise the “Momentum” part of GCSE Physics.
In summer/autumn 2012, they learnt the basics of game design and development. We didn’t do any formal teaching – they simply had to pick up the skills they needed as we went along. YouTube videos, and “trial and error”, were our primary techniques…
In particular, they learnt 3D-modelling and texturing (using Wings3D and Photoshop) and game-programming (using Unity3D and Javascript).
By the end of 2012, they’d written their own physics engine, some basic gameplay, and a simple simulation of an exercise/problem in Momentum.
The big thing this month has been BETT. Pearson had a large stand, and asked the students along to talk about the project. They gave an excellent presentation to an audience of approx 30 people at BETT, covering the background and some of the things that went well, that didn’t, and what they’d learnt from it.
Leading up to BETT, they worked hard to squeeze in a new build of the game, with a rethink on the interactive sections and how they hang together. Unfortunately, we hit what seemed to be a major bug in Unity’s camera-handling, and none of us could fix it in time (nor could we get an answer from Unity support in time). But the students managed to invent a workaround at the last minute which worked fine for demoing at BETT.
The game isn’t finished yet – GCSE’s and schoolwork left too little time to complete it before BETT – but we’re very close now. The students are aiming to finish it off this month and next, and I’m hoping I might even be able to take a copy to the GDC conference in March (taking place in San Francisco, GDC is the commercial games industry’s main annual conference).
In the meantime … you can sign up now on the Quantum Games website (http://quantumgames.co.uk), and we’ll email you as soon as the game is ready – or sooner, with a private beta-test!
The 21st century will be dominated by “digital” culture and art. History suggests that non-digital art will flourish too (while becoming a smaller, more specialized, part of a larger pie). So it’s all good: more people will have more opportunities to create – and more access to experience – a wider array of art. Win/win!
Except … our societies are struggling to work out how we’ll pay our artists when the marginal price of a copy is less than a penny.
Last week, something interesting happened when several unrelated projects I’m in all came together at once.
Marcel at http://www.cgtextures.com/ gives away a huge library of high-res photo textures, aimed at game-developers, entirely for free. You don’t pay for access, you don’t pay to use them. You can include them in commercial games, make a million dollars – and you owe him nothing (bar gratitude).
Last week he came to a private forum asking for advice on suspected copyright infringers, who might have been taking his free images, removing the attribute/authorship info, and selling them for themselves.
Copying the images, and charging for them, is not theft. It’s illegal, but it’s not stealing. The original source is still available – free – to anyone who wants it. And many authors in this case are inclined to let the scummers go free, so long as they stop charging innocent users for something that’s free to all.
But CGTextures isn’t free to run; if they ever need to raise funds to pay for it, some of that money – which the community would happily donate – is being taken right now by a selfish scummer. Hmm. Tricky.
If you’re “not an artist” (which for most people means: “I’m crap at drawing/painting!”) then making any kind of 2D art is very difficult, and tends to look like utter crap.
Computer games are dominated by good or great art. Even in the Indie scene, where “teams” are often no more than 2 people working together, we have a blinding array of beautiful artworks. At the opposite end of the spectrum – the AAA titles with budgets counted in “tens of millions” of dollars – it only gets better.
People love playing games – and they love making them too. Many people – artists and programmers – dream of “making a game”. But … just like “I’ve a great idea for a book” … the vast majority never manage it.
Two of the most common reasons they fail:
We’re in the final few weeks of proving this (a team of three 15-year-olds are about to publish their iPhone game that they designed, built, tested, and launched from scratch).
Starting with nothing but beginner-level knowledge of Javascript (not enough to write an app), they’ve:
Sounds hard, right? Well, yes, it was. But – if you know enough tricks of the trade – most of that can be made easy enough for anyone to do themselves.
This is all great, but I’ve glossed-over one item there: textures. You can avoid the need for painting skills by making your game-items 3D instead of 2D, but sooner or later you’re going to need to texture them.
With the programming, one of the skills I’ve drummed into them is JFGI (Just F’ing Google It). Everytime you get stuck: google it. If you get no hits – fine, you’ll have to work it out yourself. But often you’ll find:
Leveraging the internet as a resource is fundamental to being a great programmer. I’ll gloss over the risks / dangers for now (I’ll write another post on that later), but most of the time you cannot JFGI too often.
But … with the 2D artwork, with the textures for 3D models … Google becomes a danger.
Writing a presentation, and need an image? Google Images it!
…making a game, and need a “wood texture”? Google Images it!
WHOA THERE, JOHNNY!
Doesn’t feel like stealing (that’s cos it isn’t) – but it is something illegal: copyright infringement. It’s precisely why “copyright” was invented in the first place.
And yet: this single problem can make all your effort, all your hard work on your own creative artwork (your game), invalid. You can have the most sublime game design, a control system that a toddler can master, a frame-rate as smooth as silk … but if the 2D graphics (or the textures) are crap … the whole thing falls flat on its face. And most people can’t draw.
There are simple techniques for making very good textures starting from random photographs. Even a novice can create something perfectly “good enough” in a short amount of time.
Only one thing is needed: a big library of photographs, MORE THAN ONE per real-world “texture” you need to create. If you have the money, there are dozens of Stock Photography resources, each one costing hundreds (or: thousands) of dollars a year.
But if you’re students – undergraduates, high-schoolers – or simply “not rich” (“artist” isnt’ exactly a high-paid career) and working on your own, you probably don’t have “hundreds of dollars”.
Hey, I know! Let’s use Google Imag- … crap.
Enter stage left: > http://www.cgtextures.com/ – a FREE, ROYALTY-FREE, MASSIVE collection of photographs DESIGNED FOR USING IN COMPUTER GAMES. Why? I guess Marcel is just a naturally generous person.
I showed the guys CGT. No problem; texture sources a-plenty. And it’s all free. And legal…
IMNSHO, anti-software-piracy organizations tend to be idiotic, amoral, and begging to be nuked from orbit. They’re often part of the problem, not the solution. If they genuinely wanted to reduce piracy, they should be creating sites like Marcel’s: royalty-free resources of reduced cost that their industries could easily afford to give away for free.
The debate has – for way too long – characterized software pirates as “inherently evil; bad-doers; malicious”. This is undoubtedly true of some (my opionions of anyone re-selling CGT’s free art are unprintable). But we’re not born as software-pirates; we get that way because of the culture and society we grow up in. We have the opportunity to teach new generations respect for copyright – but that cuts both ways.
In the Digital Age, copyright needs to deserve our respect, not simply demand it.
While checking some of the points in this post, I noticed a few other photo-texture sites that offer royalty-free images suitable for games dev, worth checking out:
I don’t normally blog about this stuff, but here we have the intersection of an eloquent speaker on core matters of modern life and how they intersect the legal systems … with the kind of tragedy that’s often threatened when elements of society have orders of magnitude more power than responsibility:
http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully
The public statement by the prosecutors is worth reading too:
http://0v.org/carmen-ortiz-has-released-a-statement/
UPDATE: according to the United States Department of Justice’s own website (?), in relation to this case:
United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz said, “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar
It is extremely difficult in practice (practically impossible?) to steal via “a computer command”. To me, the Attorney’s statement has no relevance to what – it is reported – happened in this case.
For reference, type “define: stealing” into Google, and see what you get
Lawyers can *always* hide behind a claim that they’re “only following the letter of the law”; unfortunately, the Western legal system is generally based upon NOT following the letter of the law, but the spirit of the lawmakers (as interpreted by various stages of Judges). Which makes such arguments inherently specious.
I’m not a lawyer, merely a slightly-informed amateur, but … If this is the best defence that the prosecutors can offer, as eloquent lawyers, it appears to me that they knowingly do terrible things.
(background: after 8 years as one of the world’s mid-tier MMO games, City of Heroes (+ City of Villains) is being shut down. The community banded together to ask if they could take over running the world that meant so much to them; NCsoft (the publisher, and a company I used to work for) said: no)
NCsoft is basically saying: “Please. We love you, but … you just *don’t understand*. It’s more complex than you could possibly imagine!”
That’s not a dialogue; it reads like a “this conversation ends when I stop talking” monologue.
Lots of people wondering that. Obviously, being a public company, no-one’s going to answer that in public. We can only guess. But hear’s a few (over the top) suggestions…
If the community succeeds … then THE FEAR IS: some Executive(s), somewhere, are going to look like bad (I’m not accusing; I’m just saying that in corporates I’ve worked at, this kind of *fear* is common). A lot of the work they do is guess-work. That’s fine, they’re paid to make the best decision they can, while never truly know if they made the right one.
But if a bunch of inexperienced, eager novices come along and offer to do it for free. And – the worst possible outcome – they succeed … that could make someone look really bad.
Another thing I’ve seen in corporate politics at this level is a lot of “horse-trading”. i.e. sacrificing one project (that someone else resents, or has been snubbed by) in return for that person helping out out with a problem on a separate project, that you’re trying to rescue.
Who (individually or collectively) made the decision, and what did they stand to gain or lose? (they are probably worried about / aiming for / trying to win … something bigger than this single game. c.f. my 2009 post on why NCsoft is so huge a company gains nothing from “profitable” games, they need “mega profitable” games)
Ha!
Has anyone found out yet what format(s) the data is in? Imagine the most insane, unwieldy, incomprehensible, inconsistent, unusable format that bears no relationship *at all* to the game itself … and you’re probably half way there.
This game was written *8 years ago*.
Read the biographies of the people involved. Were they non-game developers … academics with decades of expertise in distributed systems and real-time transaction messaging? … or … were they a bunch of smart guys trying to catch up with the academic research in the space of months, just enough to build and ship a major new computer game? And … most importantly … to make it “fun” before they ran out of budget.
I’ve not yet found an MMO where the people who made it feel – with hindsight – they had any idea what they were doing at the start. When they started, of course, many of them thought they’d covered all the bases, and were “well prepared”. Everyone tries their best up-front (or fails completely); but everyone finds it much harder than expected.
Looking at it analytically and logically, I’d give the community a very high chance of failing dismally if they were given the game. But … the eagerness, the excitement, the sheer determination: I’d give them a small chance of succeeding despite everything. Simply because: when you see this much determination, it often wins out and overcomes the obstacles in its way.
So, I say: Go for it.
They know the game they’re trying to (re-)create. The difficulty is simple: whenever you try to re-create a game, the temptation is always there to “improve” it … and 99 times in 100, you find you slightly misunderstood what you were “improving”.
What happens when you get 2 developers working together, sharing their source? What about 10? … or a 100?
There was a dream, 20 years ago, that the total would be greater than the sum of the parts. That developers could *re-use* each-other’s code.
Sadly, that dream – in 2012 – is poisoned.
What I’m going to describe here happens a lot – although in absolute terms, I hope it’s just a drop in the ocean. Maybe it’s nothing to worry about. Or maybe … well. In the last 15-odd GitHub projects I’ve tried to use, it affected more than a third of them. Such tiny stats are statistically meaningless, of course – but if you look at the causes of this, I think it’s more likely part of a general trend – and that really is worrying.
So. What’s going on?
I love GitHub, I’m a paying member (and I regularly sell it to clients and colleagues) but … in some ways, it’s IMHO actively preventing collaboration.
Just to be clear: it doesn’t have to be this way – you can run your own projects on GitHub and prevent this happening.
But … GitHub makes this the path of least resistance, and that means – in the world of Open Source – it’s the path that gets most followed
When you fix a bug on GitHub, you have to wait for the original project author to “accept” your fix.
If they don’t accept it, as far as collaboration goes: you’re screwed. There is no “plan B” for collaboration.
Your only option is to tell the world:
“Stop using his project! It sucks! Use my project instead! I promise I’ll be a better merger!”
But then … if *you* stop accepting fixes for a while, one of the developers fixing YOUR bugs will have to do the same thing.
And each of these “Stop! Use mine instead!” calls is one-way: once another developer who’s making use of the source moves to a sub-fork, they can never go back. In theory, the original Author could do a back-dated merge … but in reality, that won’t happen, because of the cost involved:
In practice, that’s more expensive than a normal person can afford, in terms of time and effort.
For each SubAuthor they want to back-merge with, they have to check every single change that person has made … against every change that they’ve merged already, from every single source. Otherwise they break the previously-merged code. Usually, each individual SubAuthor makes an incompatible change sooner or later – and so prevents the original Author from ever merging with them.
It’s no surprise – usually by this point the Sub Author has given up on the original Author (can you blame them? the Author has disappeared and ignored merge requests for months or years by this point)
So, in practice, very few GitHub authors (so far: none that I’ve seen) re-merge SubAuthor projects once the SubAuthor has really got going. On the projects I’ve been involved in, when a popular SubAuthor disappears for a while, there’s been a desperate scramble by the SubSubAuthors to find the guy/gal and beg/bribe/bully them into merging – otherwise we know that our combined efforts are about to be blown up.
What? Well …
Say you have Author “A”, and 3 people making changes and fixes to the code (“B”, “C”, and “D”).
At first, while A accepts merges quickly, B, C and D are all sharing code together – in practice, they are collaborating. However, they are not truly sharing code – GitHub does not allow this – they are sharing code with a Master (A), who is forwarding their work to all 3 of them.
When A disappears, B C and D can no longer collaborate. If A disappears with merges pending … then B/C/D find they have 3 distinct codebases, and no way within GitHub to do a simple cross-merge.
Now, the situation is not lost – if B, C, and D get in contact (somehow) and negotiate which one of them is going to become “the primary SubAuthor” (somehow), and they issue manual patches to each other’s code (surprisingly tricky to do on GitHub) … then they can resume collaboration. I’ve done this myself – it works. But it’s massively more complex than the process they were using before, which was *one-click-merge*.
In practice, at this point B/C/D will stop collaborating. Sad, but true. This happens over and over again on GitHub projects – when a SubAuthor arises, the other collaborators stop collaborating and become new SubAuthors in their own right.
Often it feels like watching a religion split, with each of the senior priests declaring themself “the new Prophet”, and going forth to spread (their) word…
In theory, GitHub is wonderful.
But the combination of its bad design around some core use-cases, and its intransigence when it comes to the VERY common case of a single person disappearing … have lead to the point where I believe it’s killing projects. This is a gross generalization – and not every project that loses its Author will get this problem – but I’ve encountered more and more “dead” projects on GitHub over the course of 2011.
Of course … the way GitHub is designed, *those projects do not appear to be dead*. Often they appear to be very much “alive” – there’s tonnes of activity.
But all that activity is going on in radically different and massively incompatible forks. It’s wasted time and energy, it’s programmers fixing the same bugs – multiple times – because they are NOT collaborating any more.
In the case I cited at the start, 100-plus developers have (probably) re-written the same fixes for the same problems.
i.e. the total effect of this project is tending towards ONE HUNDRED TIMES less than the sum of its parts.
Note: LESS … not more!
There’s some value there, still – anyone can come along and start from the original project and make their own fork. But it’s a sad and sorry fraction of what the Open Source world dreamed of when the word Collaboration was fresh and exciting.
This is UnCollaboration. And its becoming depressingly common.
Someone just wrote this comment on one of my StackOverflow answers:
Fundamentally, this question/answer pair is saying:
“Apple: one of your non-programming managers made a stupid mistake in one of your core tools, one used every day by hundreds of thousands of people; since you won’t fix it, here’s a (tricky) workaround that anyone can use”
Apple “doesn’t do” anything open, doesn’t do community support, or community development – you’re not even allowed to know if you’re the first person to report a bug, or the millionth.
But if they did, just imagine how much better their tools would be, and how much more productive the iOS developer community would be…
Here’s a new term: The FAILtrepreneur
FAILtrepreneurdef: someone who tries to be an Entrepreneur, and takes advantage of lots of things intended to “help” them be a success, but somehow finds each “help” pushes them further and further into mediocrity and the failure of their business. Then they go work for a management consultancy; they have great stories to tell about their jolly jaunty time playing at being an Entrepreneur
Time and again, these people think they’re “helping”. They never stop to think about what their assumptions say about themselves – and how little they say about Entrepreneurs.
Typically, they believe that startup-founders-to-be need:
The last thing that Entrepreneurs need – the very last thing – is to be given handouts or to be patronized.
Being an Entrepreneur is *all about* starting from an inferior position and not just out-doing everyone else, but positively eclipsing them.
The idea that they need “a leg up” or “handouts” is laughable – all it does is re-enforce the qualities and expectations that the Entrepreneur needs to avoid.
Resource; specifically: whatever resource they cannot manufacture for themselves, out of thin air.
Ultimately, a great Entrepreneur is someone who sees opportunities, leaps on them, knocks them to the ground, and exploits the heck out of them.
If they can do that, normally they can magic-up whatever else they need. But there’s often a couple of needs that prove slightly too overwhelming:
Everything else is fluff:
(this would need a series of posts just to summarise the successes and failures to date – and I believe the professional investors of this world are doing a pretty good job already via the VC blogs, the Angel blogs, VentureHacks, etc)
Professional investors won’t touch a small failed business with a bargepole (usually).
Not because there’s no profit there – there manifestly IS profit there – but because the potential upside has been given a glass ceiling, and they’re not interested in “small but steady profit”.
Fair enough; but that leaves a gulf where someone else could step in. If the businesses that failed are big enough, then professional investors are happy to be involved – the money becomes enough to excite them. It’s when they’re small that there’s a black hole.
Any journalist who continues to not only re-hash the self-aggrandizing bull**** of greedy and abusive games-industry managers, but goes further and writes about these people and their behaviour in unquestioning, positive terms … is open-season for ridicule right now. We’ve had enough; developers are starting to get really pissed at journalists who kow-tow to the rich and the powerful, while ignoring the people who actually, you know, *make* the games they’re supposed to care about.
By no means the worst example, but Nathan’s recent pieces on Michael Pachter were the last straw for me, personally.
Nathan, a writer for EDGE online, could perhaps benefit from the following observations. I’m not a researcher, I’m not a journalist, but I think there’s more than enough circumstantial info here to suggest that Nathan should have been a lot more careful about presenting Michael’s comments in such a positive, accepting, unquestioning, light.
Another week, another expose of terrible working conditons in a game-development studio.
I’m fed up.
So … here’s a new site where I’ll post/track each public report of this stuff:
(the name is sarcastic, obviously ;). co.uk because it’s less than half the price of a .com, and I’m cheap :P)
In yet another Team-Bondi-is-great-and-I-<3-the-Crunch letter, Dave Hieronymous manages to come across as a corporate apologist, or simply delusional. Heard of the 5-days-a-week working week? Well ... reading Dave’s open letter … I guess everyone else on the planet is just … a slacker? … not trying hard enough?
“Recognising that working on the weekend was inevitable”
Your project took 7 years.
SEVEN YEARS.
For a project that most industry professionals I’ve spoken to agree could/should have been done in 2-3 years.
And working weekends was “inevitable”?
Bullshit.
“I never (and in my experience, neither did any of the other managers) expected anything from my team that I didn’t expect of myself. The management team at Team Bondi was not ensconced in an Ivory Tower working normal hours while everyone else crunched. Brendan himself worked very long hours and few of us here in the studio are aware of how grueling the DA and motion capture shoot in LA was.”
So … do you believ that if you’re a sado-masochistic idiot who has no personal or social life and hates every living thing on the planet, including yourself … it’s no longer “abuse” if you force other people to live the same way?
I’ve already called Brendan out on this. So, for Dave, let’s recap: for the managers to work extra hours, when they’re sitting on vast amounts of equity and/or typically much larger salary packages (a 2x multiple – or more – is common), is one thing.
For them to tell everyone else – who is being rewarded very little by comparison – is another thing entirely.
Also, Brendan chooses what hours to work. His employees get told. “Agency” is a pretty huge thing in human psychology, and is a big part of that thing we call “Freedom”. You cannot simply ignore it.
Team Bondi: even their staunchest defenders keep damning it. If they offer you a job, I advise you: Run, don’t walk, in the opposite direction.
This letter to the IGDA, apparently defending Team Bondi’s alleged abuse of their game-developers, seems to me to be damning with faint praise – or just showing that the author is shockingly naive. e.g.:
“I had two kids during the project, Team Bondi offered me each time one extra week off ( on top of the required week )”
According to online resources on AU paternity leave, the legal minimum is “Up to 1 week unpaid taken at time of birth … Employer has right to refuse.”.
OK, so Australia has/had a barbaric paternity leave system (which, incidentally, is being massively overhauled in 2011). But it’s really nothing to be proud of that your employer gave a new father 2 weeks of leave instead of 1. I wouldn’t want a new father back in the office for at least a month – even if we were desperate for staff in those weeks, the guy’s going to be massively sleep-deprived, charged with a whole new set of emotions, etc. Not good for him, not good for his colleagues.
And, really … do you feel it’s OK to take someone’s child away from them for 13 hours at a time, after just one week?
