Easy Allies Podcast #134 - 10/17/18

My boss also has his own plane, I feel you

Just a clarification on Ian's idea to bring in extra developers at the end of a project. As a developer for over 10 years (although not in video games) I don't think it is a viable strategy. Often it can take months to get someone up to speed with a codebase, especially to the point where they can work while you're not there and during that time you are losing your main developers as they are the ones that have to do the teaching. Also if you want someone to come in a pick up a codebase quickly they probably aren't the kind of developer that you can hire quickly and are willing to be on a short term project. There's also a saying in software development, adding more developers to a problem is like saying that because 1 woman can make a baby in 9 months, that 9 women can make a baby in 1 month.

Tom Bowen

I've been a software engineer for over a decade in a small part of one of the larger (non gaming) software conglomerates on the planet. The expectation of working beyond reasonable hours is a major concern to me and others I work with. Admittedly it's rarer, and less extreme than what I've heard about games dev. I've been asked to put in whatever effort is necessary for the next X weeks, I've been asked to cancel holidays, I've had holidays interrupted where the people available weren't enough. All of those have happened numerous times. People who are more amenable to constantly working long hours are praised, and some even pulled into a special dev team. It's expected that we use our own time to keep up to date with new practices, frameworks, or languages and think about how they can be applied. Others have expressed to me that they worry about their jobs and that the people who always work 50+ hours a week put too high an expectation on everyone else. As an aside, I can't afford to buy a house, my pension pot is half of what it should be for my age. Meanwhile, my bosses boss (not a director) has his own plane, and the director of our small part, from what I'm told earns around 20 times what I earn. And the exec team spends money on frivolous toys, while standing in front of us and telling us to work extra hard to hit targets. Capatilism is broken. This turned into a rant.

Kif

Kind of disappointed that the crunch in the video game industry talk didn't link back to Telltale's mass layoffs without severance those couple weeks ago. I'm not sure how much crunch they went through leading up to the layoffs, but they can hardly point to any reward they received from their efforts in that situation.

PKFC

The plural of "octopus" is "octopodes". Greek ≠ Latin. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvlaiq7alO4&amp;t=2447" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvlaiq7alO4&amp;t=2447</a>

I Son-Tchor

Unionizing the game development industry will only cover the crunch problem and will never solve it. I believe it will increase the games prices, stagger the market globally, reduce new IPs and encourage outsourcing. Game development is a complicated risky process and from working in another but similar industry I can say that the planning methods and the development complicated stages are the main problems that needs to changed, in addition game studios are covering a wide range of departments and that is always a risk to do everything inhouse. So, you will always see studios recruit VFX talents late in the development cycle while writers will be in from day one for most games. I will keep it short but It's really a deep and interesting topic to talk and write about.

Mr_Cid

Surprisingly good and nuanced discussion on crunch, thank you :) The main problem will persist as long as we put product and money over human beings. This is what has to change and it will be a long tedious process.

erni

Oh wow, the no overtime thing sucks! Though I did expect it. My partner works for a large social media company in Vancouver, often pulling 12hr days, with no overtime.

James McCoy

Just gotta say the Steven King miniseries Storm of the Century is legit good and holds up I just re-watched it a few weeks ago.

TheClassiestHobo

Ian at one point asked why they don't just bring in more people at crunch time, since they're already spending more for overtime. Most game devs are salaried employees, and do not get overtime. In the US, there is even a federal exemption from overtime for software developers. <a href="https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17e_computer.pdf" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17e_computer.pdf</a> Additionally, doubling the size of a software development team at the end of a project is usually going to lead to more headaches and slow down than will actually help anything. It takes time for even experienced software developers to become acclimated with large, unfamiliar code bases. It's simply not a feasible solution. It can be helpful to bring on a handful of new people and give them specialized roles, but you can't expect to double the productivity of the team by doubling its size.

The Langoliers is my guilty pleasure, lol.

Minamik

What brandon describes is actually how my QA job is, during busy times we split shifts and come in to people warming our chairs so theres 24 hour coverage. and yeah it does get like too many cooks at times. You guys saying about young people being eager and willing to do anything so the people who don't get let go is 100% accurate.

sam

Hey Ian - There happens to be a Tycoon / Fallout Shelter style game where you deal with monsters like in Cabin in the Woods / SCP, it's called Lobotomy Corporation. You have to manage your staff and have them gather energy from creatures ranging from possessed shoes, fairies, evil teddy bears, a soda dispenser and much more. It's also very rough around the edges as English is not the Developers first language. But if you can give it a chance, you'll have fun.

Cathal Fallon

Agreed. I don't work in game dev but I work in PM and we always have crunch when we get close to client deadlines. Usually it comes in two waves: new dev crunch (with a cutoff of 2-4 weeks before release); and QA/testing crunch (which is all-hands-on-deck after the new dev work stops). Even then you have stuff that isn't perfect bc of missed bugs or lacking functionality.

It was a good try though :P For the English allies among us (and Kyle), here's how to pronounce 'Hallo Gemakkelijke Bondgenoten' Hah-low Guh-mah-kuh-lick-uh Bond-guh-no-tuh

Stefan Vlemmix

OLED TV's used to have burn-in issues but the 2018 models are much improved and no longer suffer from burn in. The only downside to an OLED TV is they aren't super bright so in bright rooms they can look a little dim.

Jordan Brown

I agree 100%, I have a LG B7 and burn in is a non-issue. There are also some test you can look up online, like this one <a href="https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/real-life-oled-burn-in-test" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/real-life-oled-burn-in-test</a> They test COD and Fifa and only Fifa starts to burn in a bit, because of the static non-transparent elements on screen. In general, as long as you play games with HUDs that turn off from time to time or are transparent (that's pretty much every game out there because of cutscenes and loading screens) there won't even be short term image retention.

traenkeopa

Correction: That dutch was not nailed at all. Met vriendelijke groet, Mede bondgenoot

The thing you're missing about the crunch talk is the fact that coding is just that difficult and unpredictable. Even the best developers in the world are constantly learning because programming is just that difficult. You can't plan for bugs and software and you can't plan for how long it will take to solve software problems.

Robert A Iglehart

Over Black Friday last year I bought both The Evil Within 2 and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus on PC off Amazon as a physical bluray disc for $25 each (and they had both just come out). It's just like buying any other console game.

GW Fawkes

There are people who want the crunch if it makes the game better or finish sooner. It's the same people who make death threats to devs and publishers when the game isn't what they wanted. All they care about is the game. Killer clowns from outer space would make a fun game!

Chris H

CORRECTIONS -Keith David brawls with Roddy Piper in They Live. -Sweat does not stink, it is the waste from bacteria on our skin that causes BO. This is usually the result of poor hygeine not sweating. -People do not have pheromones. There is a large body of scientific evidence to support this. A pheromone would be a chemical that an individual releases, that influences the behavior of another member of the same species. L&amp;R Morgan Mohalla

Morgan Mohalla

Not a correction but thought this would be relevant; OLED screens have very good latency for games (the LG OLED TVs have some of the best response times out there for HDTVs) but also do have image retention issues when the same image stays on screen for many hours. I can confirm this as I have an OLED TV and had to keep switching off of Easy Livin' because the Hoeg Law logo wouldn't go away after a while. As long as you turn off the TV after a few hours the issue usually goes away, so not too big of a deal. To go into more detail if you care, there is a difference between burn-in and image retention. Most all OLED's will see some image retention with the same static image on the screen for an extended period of a couple hours, but this is not permanent. Burn in, however, is when it never goes away and is pretty rare for OLED's outside situations where you have it on a TV channel with a news ticker all day, or if you use it for your computer monitor it can burn in the taskbar at the bottom after extended use.

Will Schmuck

That's a shirt depicting the Buran, they gifted it to him because the Buran is in Tetris and saluting the departure of the Buran was an integral part of the Bosman V Wozniak stream. It wasn't meant as a political statement.

Hi EZA. Big fan and Your Patreon supporter since the biginnig. This is first time when I write a comment. This podcast made me furious Kyle. Do You know what kind of monstrous and totally absurd thing did f!@#ing cccp? I hope You know, but if not, please look in internet or books or somewhere else, there is latvian movie called The Soviet Story. I happen to be proud Latvian, I live in contry which was occupied by cccp for 50 years. Your T-shirt sucks. It has that flag and symbol. Throw that peace of sh@#$t away. Would You wear T-shirt vith nazi official symbols? Sad dude…sad.

pssst Ian you should horizontally flip that Easy Allies wallpaper one time for the one time L&amp;R

Mac

Sorry about that, it should be there now. - Damiani

Easy Allies

Best L&amp;R game ever

Tanner Methven

I bought a Vita used with a pretty burned in screen. Idk if the previous owner abused it, but it definitely is noticable when the screen goes black while turned in.

CertainlyCity

so horror movie into a video game how about nightmare on elm street done in the style of persona

Soundcloud link?

Rosamune

I recently got a new job which allowed me to become a patron, and almost all the allies liked my tweet about how I could finally afford the support my favorite people on the internet. I've been tentatively working freelance as a graphic designer for years with struggling success. I was recently hired by a very successful marketing/pr firm here in LA and their culture is AMAZING, it's not ball pits and Nerf battles but they allow creative freedom and empower their employees with security and trust something that as a freelancer was completely foreign to me. My whole attitude has changed and I feel great. Basically, don't give up! Believe in yourself! I hope everyone finds a place they can do what they love! P.s. imposter syndrome is real, fail early and often.

the signoff is soooo good

I bet the movie Cube would make a cool video game.

Oh my god.. bros... Monster Squad video game. That movie practically IS a video game.

Raven Perez

Crunch means poor management and planning. Crunch should never be a thing.

John

I have no issues with my LG OLED 55 inch, no burn in whatsoever. So I don't think that is a blanket problem..

Dennis Allaire

At the time of this comment, DrButtThunder looks to be available on PSN.

Garrett Fox

Interestingly, there is a website where people can anonymously review their companies and several game developers are on there. It's glassdoor.co.uk and in the past I have read quite a few negative reviews for Rockstar which do mention crunch.

I actually think Dreams is an example of this forward thinking this game has been in development for six years and is my most anticipated game and doesn’t have a release date yet and they did state in an recent gameinforme interview that they haven’t experienced crunch. But many people are very quick to make fun of them and give them backlash for it taking so long. People can’t have it both ways. I’m super curious to see how this game does. If it is really successful I think this could be an interesting turning point. I’m still happy this dialogue is coming up more instead of just being ignored.

Megan Linart

Pretty sure that OLED thing is not true, unless you keep something static like CNN or a game HUD running for 20 hours, especially not compared to plasma TVs. Modern OLED TVs have anti-burn in measures built in anyway. And reaction time wise, there are good ones like the LG B8, which has comparable latency as LED screens. Oh and the Vita had an OLED screen too, never had any burn-in issues there either.