I am finding games in general "less bad" the more I get working in Project Management

[sn00zer]

I do not work in videogames. However I do work on projects that require quite a lot of coordination from many groups, and honestly it has given me a huge appreciation for the work that goes into games. Even small projects I work on can sometimes seem monumental with only a few parties at play and I cannot fucking imagine what level of effort it takes to make an Ubisoft game. I think as a player I can think "oh boy this game is not for me" (looking at Ubisoft games), but the worker in me can at least glimpse at the effort that it took to make the game.

Its definitely made me appreciate games in a different light. Its no longer just about playing a game, but thinking about the tasks that needed the game to get there. The coordination between artists, engineers, programmers, marketers, musicians, actors etc. to get this guy to look this way to do this particular animation against this particular enemy at this time in this setting with this music. It's made me more impressed with games than I used to be.
Its funny, I can look at Assassins Creed and think "Oh wow the amount of people involved in this must have been a nightmare to organize" and then look at Shovel Knight and think "Oh wow they did this with that small a team?".

I think a lot of this came to ahead when playing FF7 Remake. There are so many scenes that are just "out there", but beautifully crafted, it just makes you wonder how it all came together the way it did. Then remembering they actually needed to swap devs and then juggle the team with the rest of the demands of Square Enix. Its impressive even before you even start talking about what its like to play the game as a player.

Been listening a lot to Game Makers Notebook, which is really interesting open conversations between higher ups in game (Ted Price, owner of Insomniac is usually the host) that gives hints at the monumental tasks it takes to make a game. Two of the more eyeopening ones were the conversation with Ashraf Ismail the director of Assassins Creed Origin (and now Valhalla) and Stig director of Jedi Fallen Order. Both give a real understanding of how complex these things are in a way that I havent heard articulated before.

Google Podcasts

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The AIAS Game Maker's Notebook - Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Director Stig Asmussen

Are you a fan of the show? We need your help! Please take a moment to fill out this quick listener survey. Stig Asmussen sits down with Ted Price to talk about his journey from drawing art to game development, owning failures while sharing successes with the team, sharing their mutual...

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Dunno just noticed as I get older (30+) I am enjoying games more and more and in different ways that isnt just playing the game anymore. I was wondering if anyone else out there is feeling the same.

 

[HardTimesFamilyPride]

I do this, especially with movies. Much prefer this kind of analysis to most media discourse tbh

 

[kenta]

Funny timing, I'm getting into project management myself and I can see how it provides a new sense of appreciation

what was kind of a bummer is when I dabbled in programming years ago, it caused me to start seeing the puppet strings in games, and it's been hard to stop seeing them (but when a game does something to defy belief it really hits me)

hopefully I'll end up taking your same path and seeing them in a better light again

 

[Dremorak]

As a dev, you understand how hard it is to make a functional BAD game.

Its 10X harder to make a functional decent game lol.

 

[texhnolyze]

I was a project coordinator too until recently (albeit in a much smaller scale), just promoted to a managerial position. But yeah, everything makes sense from a project perspective, especially if you outsource much of the work to different people. Each department has their own QA, then there's the main QA at the top. Lots of stuff are being reworked, or worse, getting trashed. It's definitely challenging and quite a nightmare, but when everything comes together as one piece, it was always so satisfying.

 

[Deleted member 56752]

can you imagine running project management for AC Odyssey? I am utterly blown away by it. I didn't like it at first, but once I put it on easy and just messed around with it, man. It is IMPOSSIBLE to hate this game. It's incredible. Bloated, sure, but my god man. It's a 9.5

 

[sn00zer]

can you imagine running project management for AC Odyssey? I am utterly blown away by it. I didn't like it at first, but once I put it on easy and just messed around with it, man. It is IMPOSSIBLE to hate this game. It's incredible. Bloated, sure, but my god man. It's a 9.5

Click to shrink...

you should give the podcast I linked to a listen, specifically regarding AC series

 

[entremet]

I wish gamers were more sensitive to this. When I see reactions in thread saying stuff this doesn't look next gen or laments of delays, I wince for the teams killing themselves getting these projects out.

 

[PaulloDEC]

I think having a basic understanding of how a thing is made always gives you a greater appreciation for the thing in question. You can always tell the people who've never bothered to learn about a subject based on how they criticize it.

 

[Pat_DC]

Great thread and OT. As someone who works as Creative Director and hands on in 3d it blows me away how some of these projects come together.
The planning, logistics and organisation for something like AC Odyssey with all the different artists, assets, studios etc to come together as well as it does amazes me.

Even when I don't enjoy certain games as much as I'd like to (FF7R) there is still plenty I can get out of the experience and I try to avoid hyperbole where possible when describing my issues.

 

[TriggerShy]

Even though it's pretty well known that games are a collaborative process, it's still pretty hard to really wrap my head around the actual scope of it.

 

[matcha pocky]

along the same lines I took a game dev class for my capstone course and now it's fucking jaw dropping to think about all the work that goes into a good game. And also all the work that actually goes into coming up with ideas and making a game fun

 

[ToddBonzalez]

I'm a designer in AAA and people seriously underestimate how hard it is to make a game that's shippable (free of crash bugs and playable from beginning to end at a reasonable FPS). Let alone making something that's actually good.

 

[GamerJM]

It's definitely incredibly impressive work, but I'll be honest, games are so beyond the scope of what my mind even comprehends as possible to develop that it's hard for my brain to perceive them this way when I'm actually playing games. Like, the work I do requires a team of over a dozen people often working long hours, and it's so much less ambitious in scope than games. And as someone who's dabbled in programming and software development before but quit because of how bad I was, large video games are just so far above anything I could have ever done.

So, when I think about them like this, logically I have to give huge props to the teams. But my brain just can't wrap my head around it without consciously thinking about it if that makes sense.

 

[Pancracio17]

Yeah, making an AAA game is incredibly hard, especially now that assets have to be really high quality and you have to outsource them.

 

[Nephilim]

Yeah, i'm blown away how for example things like TW3 or RDR2 come together.
I'm also impressed by huge multiplayer games like Battlefield.

I'm asking myself what is harder to make a good movie or a good videogame... anyone a clue?

 

[Philippo]

OP it's literally my same experience, as I began as a Project Manager a couple of years ago I started to realize how difficult it is to handle large projects and see stuff coming together without everything falling apart.

Hell, I started to appreciate the intricacies behind it that I've been trying to become a PM in the games industry for a year now (without success sadly).

 

[Deleted member 12790]

"lazy devs"

 

[Soriku]

Yeah the more you know the inner workings of something, the more things click and added appreciation is a given.

 

[SpartyCrunch]

The biggest learning I've had after a decade of working in software is that the answer to "can't they just...?" is no.

 

[Tailzo]

When I do a single 6-7 animation in 2d or just a couple of illustrations, it takes a lot of time. Meetings, co operation, ect

just imagine a whole game!

 

[Gay Bowser]

The biggest learning I've had after a decade of working in software is that the answer to "can't they just...?" is no.

Click to shrink...

Hahaha, so true.

I wish gamers were more sensitive to this. When I see reactions in thread saying stuff this doesn't look next gen or laments of delays, I wince for the teams killing themselves getting these projects out.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, I die inside a little every time I see someone non-ironically talk about "lazy devs."

One of the key takeaways from Jason Schreier's excellent Blood, Sweat, and Pixels is that basically every shipping game is a minor miracle.

I'm asking myself what is harder to make a good movie or a good videogame... anyone a clue?

Click to shrink...

I don't know if I would say it's "harder," but making what we think of as being a "good" videogame is much more complicated.

 

[Deleted member 419]

I'm asking myself what is harder to make a good movie or a good videogame... anyone a clue?

Click to shrink...

I'm probably biased because I work in film, but I personally think making a game is harder by far, largely because of things like debugging. In film you shoot footage and then cut it in post, at no point throughout that process does doing anything break something else other than things like continuity errors, which you usually have just a single person who is in charge of making sure don't happen. Now compare this to games where fixing one problem potentially causes multiple others and those solutions likewise break something else. I can't even wrap my head around how difficult developing games must be.

EDIT: As for the "good" part, I would say it is equally as hard because "good" is usually relative to whatever your peers are creating; in other words, being in the top 10% of anything is always hard because the difficulty there isn't in the thing itself, but rather in standing out among other people also applying their own effort towards doing the same thing.

 

[VanDoughnut]

I've tried to animate something in Dreams and yeah it makes me appreciate how hard it is to get right. (I've never even gotten close). (How Dreams even got made is insane when I start to think about it)

It's always a marvel checking out how a small team made Hollow Knight as good as it is, or a big team makes an Assasssins Creed game as functional as it is. How any of this is done is beyond me.

Playing Rondo of Blood and you're thinking how the hell did they do this. It's a combination of being mystified about the processes that go into making games, but at least knowing enough to know that those processes aren't easy at all.

I guess as I've gotten older it has made me appreciate the craftsmanship even more even if I'm still out there making my "FF7 what the hell is this texture?!" posts (smh)

 

[Kwigo]

Since I started working in IT and Project Management, I can't help but roll my eyes at any "lazy devs" and "how hard could it be to..." comment I stumble across.

It really gives you a new perspective on everything that needs lots of coordination and manpower to get done.

 

[Optional Objectives]

There's a lot to be said for appreciating games as the work of a whole team of people. One of the qualities about games that I like best is that they combine animation, music, sound effects (foley) work, narrative, etc. When a game actually shines in even one of those areas, I find it worthwhile to check out. If it actually manages to put them all together? Then a game becomes incredible.

 

[Mechaplum]

There's a reason why people are paid big bucks to manage resources and people. Used to do that for awhile but then decided it's way too much stress.

 

[thomasmahler]

Truth.

It's already hard to run a company that can sustain itself and pay the bills. It's really hard to even ship a game that's not great - Just shipping a finished product is really, really difficult and usually requires a monumental amount of work. Shipping something GREAT on top of that adds yet another few magnitudes of complexity on top of all that...

That's why it's so frustrating for devs to read disparaging stuff like 'How did these lazy developers not think of this or that? It took me 5 minutes to come up with the right solution!' - It's like, duh, everyone has 20/20 hindsight, it really doesn't take a genius to look at a finished product and point out what's wrong. But would you also have the incredible foresight to see every problem ahead of time when the project is just millions of little pieces that at some point may or may not turn into a finished product? Probably not.

I've interfaced with a lot of developers over the past 10 years of running Moon Studios and none of them have been dumb or lacked passion, so maybe give people the benefit of the doubt? This stuff ain't easy, far from it, otherwise people wouldn't risk their livelihoods on bets that might ruin their entire lives. And usually we also only hear about the success stories - We hired quite a few people at Moon who tried to run their own dev studio and failed for this or that reason. But them having made those mistakes and having learned from that makes them incredibly valuable to us now.

There are so many components to running a game development studio that gamers are just completely ignorant about and to be fair, how would they know? It's a super secretive industry where every fart is getting NDA'd. But yeah, if people would know how insanely complex all this stuff is and how much work often goes into stuff that nobody will ever see, there'd probably be a different sense of appreciation for what it takes to make a good game.

 

[nekkid]

I work in software, and see under the hood how this stuff gets developed. It's amazing how little most people understand how hard it is.

What's interesting is that our customers' entire enterprise operation is dependent on our stuff functioning, and we get nowhere near the grief that game developers get when there's a bit of a frame rate dip...

 

[laxu]

I'm asking myself what is harder to make a good movie or a good videogame... anyone a clue?

Click to shrink...

I would say making a good videogame is a lot harder. For movies, people are generally going to be happy if you have a decent story to tell. For example the Bourne movies have absolutely awful cinematography with shaky cams, excessive fast cuts, confusing continuity yet people still enjoyed those. With games people will forgive you for a bad story but not for bad gameplay.

Of course ultimately you want all the aspects to come together in a movie: good story, acting, cinematography, set design, wardrobe etc. It's a large effort just like a modern AAA game is. Like games there are often aspects that are expertly done but then those experiences can be dragged down by failures in other areas. For example you can have the incredible character models and textures in The Order and then that whole thing is thrown down to the shitter by its by-the-numbers cover shooter gameplay and awful level design (which is visually good, just extremely linear and cramped to play in).

I've been playing the Dark Souls 3 Cinders mod recently and in many ways it feels almost like a "director's cut" of the game where it adds so much stuff that could have been there if the developers weren't pressured by release deadlines and such. It makes the base game feel almost incomplete in some areas and improves many encounters throughout the game simply by changing item and enemy placement or adding extra enemies into an area.

Spoiler: Late game area

For example in Archdragon Peak right before the boss you have this long area that in the base game is completely empty and only worth visiting for its few items. In the Cinders mod, this area has been populated by a difficult gauntlet of enemies, making it a proper optional challenge section for experienced players.

I wish more game companies would be able to give their developers more time to work on their games after release beyond just bug fixing but it isn't financially feasible for the most part when you want your programmers, artists and designers to put their time into the next game.

 

[sn00zer]

Truth.

It's already hard to run a company that can sustain itself and pay the bills. It's really hard to even ship a game that's not great - Just shipping a finished product is really, really difficult and usually requires a monumental amount of work. Shipping something GREAT on top of that adds yet another few magnitudes of complexity on top of all that...

That's why it's so frustrating for devs to read disparaging stuff like 'How did these lazy developers not think of this or that? It took me 5 minutes to come up with the right solution!' - It's like, duh, everyone has 20/20 hindsight, it really doesn't take a genius to look at a finished product and point out what's wrong. But would you also have the incredible foresight to see every problem ahead of time when the project is just millions of little pieces that at some point may or may not turn into a finished product? Probably not.

I've interfaced with a lot of developers over the past 10 years of running Moon Studios and none of them have been dumb or lacked passion, so maybe give people the benefit of the doubt? This stuff ain't easy, far from it, otherwise people wouldn't risk their livelihoods on bets that might ruin their entire lives. And usually we also only hear about the success stories - We hired quite a few people at Moon who tried to run their own dev studio and failed for this or that reason. But them having made those mistakes and having learned from that makes them incredibly valuable to us now.

There are so many components to running a game development studio that gamers are just completely ignorant about and to be fair, how would they know? It's a super secretive industry where every fart is getting NDA'd. But yeah, if people would know how insanely complex all this stuff is and how much work often goes into stuff that nobody will ever see, there'd probably be a different sense of appreciation for what it takes to make a good game.

Click to shrink...

I wonder if this is something that that can be better articulated to players across the board. I think the scale of complexity is sometimes lost in interviews since devs need to talk about the game and less about the process when given the opportunity.

 

[Magnus]

Yes OP!!! I have this thought all the time, more and more as my career advances.
Can be a complete nightmare to get 10 Leaders and executives on the same page about the wording in one paragraph for a blurb on a website or a press release In my line of work. That alone could represent hours of coordination and effort. So yes, I always marvel at the project management and coordination that has to come together to make video games. It's wild and I wish more gamers appreciated it.

 

[BeaconofTruth]

That podcast is a fantastic listen. Ted Price also has another podcast thing for insomniac, can listen to that guy do radio all day.

I appreciate the craft part enough to be aware that "lazy dev" or saying shit like "the devs didn't care" is dumb, and should not be anyone's line of reasoning.

I'm not any less critical of the games I consume tho personally. The difficulty of the task isn't going to change the desire for a more polished product or depth of systems.

It does make one appreciate the sheer work n man hours to make something as good as Ori and it's movement mechanics or Devil May Cry 5 n Doom Eternals combat that much more impressive.

Another thing that should help people understand games more is if they watch some gdc talks. Those things are cool as hell, and highlight some of the problems devs see along the way.

 

[Cosmic Voyager]

I wonder if this is something that that can be better articulated to players across the board. I think the scale of complexity is sometimes lost in interviews since devs need to talk about the game and less about the process when given the opportunity.

Click to shrink...

Personally I think the NoClip and PlayStation documentaries do a fantastic job of this. They really peel back the veil of the finished product and show all the complications & hard work to get to that point.

For example, in PlayStation's God of War doc, they really do a great job of conveying the magnitude of the project and how much was at stake. Some highlights for me:

• When SSM's new IP got canned, the GoW team suddenly got like 100 new developers that they needed to absorb, catch up to speed, and find work for. Naturally this bred some mistrust and stress within the studio
• They spent years getting the vertical slice ready for the E3 debut, which was a resounding success. While this obviously made the devs happy, it also made them wonder "how the hell will we get the other 95% of the to this state in the next year"
• When asked about the toll development takes on family life, Shannon Studstill started to tear up and said she would rather not talk about it
• How Cory faced struggle after struggle including getting the team to buy into his vision of the story, having Shuhei Yoshida visit the studio and leave "appalled" by the combat/state of the game, trying to manage his own self-doubt while simultaneously trying to keep the studio's morale afloat, etc.

Of course then the game came out to rave reviews and is widely considered a masterpiece and one of the best games of all time. The game pulls everything off so well that it seems effortless, when in reality hundreds of people had to work like hell and push themselves to the brink to get it there. It seems laughable now to imagine SSM in danger of being closed, but that was a very real fear for them at the time if GoW didn't perform

 

[sn00zer]

Personally I think the NoClip and PlayStation documentaries do a fantastic job of this. They really peel back the veil of the finished product and show all the complications & hard work to get to that point.

For example, in PlayStation's God of War doc, they really do a great job of conveying the magnitude of the project and how much was at stake. Some highlights for me:

• When SSM's new IP got canned, the GoW team suddenly got like 100 new developers that they needed to absorb, catch up to speed, and find work for. Naturally this bred some mistrust and stress within the studio
• They spent years getting the vertical slice ready for the E3 debut, which was a resounding success. While this obviously made the devs happy, it also made them wonder "how the hell will we get the other 95% of the to this state in the next year"
• When asked about the toll development takes on family life, Shannon Studstill started to tear up and said she would rather not talk about it
• How Cory faced struggle after struggle including getting the team to buy into his vision of the story, having Shuhei Yoshida visit the studio and leave "appalled" by the combat/state of the game, trying to manage his own self-doubt while simultaneously trying to keep the studio's morale afloat, etc.

Of course then the game came out to rave reviews and is widely considered a masterpiece and one of the best games of all time. The game pulls everything off so well that it seems effortless, when in reality hundreds of people had to work like hell and push themselves to the brink to get it there. It seems laughable now to imagine SSM in danger of being closed, but that was a very real fear for them at the time if GoW didn't perform

Click to shrink...

Yeah this was definitely eye opening for sure. Same with the For Honor doc on Netflix. It is interesting because it seems like both the companies and people in both docs have some regrets about them. Shannon no longer works for Santa Monica and she basically started it for example.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

The biggest learning I've had after a decade of working in software is that the answer to "can't they just...?" is no.

Click to shrink...

"such an easy fix"

 

[Deleted member 12790]

I love when people say things like "fallout's engine is a buggy mess" and point to minor, persistent bugs across the series, saying "how in the world can these lazy devs not fix these simple problems time and time again," not realizing how interconnected literally everything is, and that those "simple problems" are usually the lesser of two evils for greater design decisions. As in, fixing those minor problems would usually cascade in huge ways elsewhere. They choose those minor problems because those are the trade offs. There are trade offs in EVERYTHING in technology

I especially love how many people talk about engines, who can't even define what an engine is (because, protip: the term engine is largely meaningless).

I also like when people bitch about things that are diametrically opposites. "I hate how large game installs are these days, can't devs compress everything? Also, I demand NO LOAD TIMES EVER."

 

[crienne]

Working in the industry, even as a technical writer, has pretty much made me look at my past self and all the Discourse™ I participated in with a lens of pure hatred.

There's so much people don't get about game dev, but damned if they don't talk like they know everything.

 

[elenarie]

The biggest learning I've had after a decade of working in software is that the answer to "can't they just...?" is no.

Click to shrink...

"Just make more maps." "Not enough content." "20 years ago, games had more maps than now." "Look at that other game, it has more maps than this game."

Right, so this game has a playable space of 60 x 40 meters, and that other one has 1200 x 400 meters. When you think about it really hard, obviously they are the same. So why not just make the same amount?!

"How could this get through QA?" "This is so obvious, nobody would actively do this?" "Seriously, you couldn't test this thing?"

Yea sure, obviously there were no other problems and challenges at all, so devs should have focused on exactly those things.

🤷‍♀️ 😆

 

[Deleted member 12790]

"Why could a modder fix this in 10 minutes when a company couldn't? INCOMPETENT DEVS"

 

[elenarie]

I love when people say things like "fallout's engine is a buggy mess" and point to minor, persistent bugs across the series, saying "how in the world can these lazy devs not fix these simple problems time and time again," not realizing how interconnected literally everything is, and that those "simple problems" are usually the lesser of two evils for greater design decisions. As in, fixing those minor problems would usually cascade in huge ways elsewhere. They choose those minor problems because those are the trade offs. There are trade offs in EVERYTHING in technology

I especially love how many people talk about engines, who can't even define what an engine is (because, protip: the term engine is largely meaningless).

I also like when people bitch about things that are diametrically opposites. "I hate how large game installs are these days, can't devs compress everything? Also, I demand NO LOAD TIMES EVER."

Click to shrink...

The Creation / Gamebryo engine, whatever you would want to call it, is incredible. So powerful, so simple and so easy to use. You can do so many amazing and creative things in it. It is so stupid that people whine about it, yet it is the very reason why both Elder Scrolls and Fallout have such a vast and incredible modding community.

 

[elenarie]

There's a reason why people are paid big bucks to manage resources and people. Used to do that for awhile but then decided it's way too much stress.

Click to shrink...

Yea, but what do the suits know. They've no idea about anything.

So many people obviously have loads of experience running 10,000+ employees 5+ billion $ revenue companies. 🤣

 

[Deleted member 12790]

The Creation / Gamebryo engine, whatever you would want to call it, is incredible. So powerful, so simple and so easy to use. You can do so many amazing and creative things in it. It is so stupid that people whine about it, yet it is the very reason why both Elder Scrolls and Fallout have such a vast and incredible modding community.

Click to shrink...

But why is it that my characters clip thru a small portion of the literally thousands of square miles of geometry????? That's just immersion breaking incompetence!

 

[learning]

Do you guys think square has project managers

 

[B00T]

Great posts in here, love seeing the discussion that stems from the topic whenever it comes up. Also seeing the venting because the stories I hear from friends and family in game dev all sound so similar, lol.

 

[never]

It's very much a lack of life experience and lack of empathy thing.

The more you see what these people are actually experiencing and the more you can relate to it, the harder it is to be mad about it.

 

[Nocturnowl]

A few threads in more recent times around here have helped open my eyes up even more to how even the stuff us clueless muggins assume are simple things to deal with are most likely still a tremendous pain in the arse.

 

[____]

As a project manager and one that's also worked in creative for 6 years, can confirm.

 

[MatrixMan.exe]

The problem with most gamers, including on Era, is that they entirely lack empathy for the people who make their hobby a reality. Or they have empathy but it's only skin deep. And most of all, they lack knowledge on how games are actually made. Seeing some of the comments on this place alone just make me cringe so hard.

Developers aren't infalliable, but making games is hard, especially over a number of years and with how complex they are these days. Even things that players think or just neat or a cool idea probably took multiple people hours to breakdown, roadmap, test and implement. Just something to think about.

 

[SolVanderlyn]

Yes, I find that having been involved in the creative side of things, it increases your appreciation for all creative endeavors a hundredfold. At least, it did for me.

Games journalism was the worst. It's like acting. Only a few make it and the rest fall to obscurity, get paid dirt and are writing for an extremely entitled audience.