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Downsized: The Wake-Up Call

On 04.02.10, In Business & Industry, My Experience, by GamingHorror

Today i learned about Downsized Games through an interview on Gamasutra: The Upside Of Downsized And Desperate.

It wasn’t in Gamasutra’s newsletter, it wasn’t on Facebook or Twitter. I was on Gamasutra for a different article as i glimpsed over that article’s headline and was immediately interested to see if that was really the kind of inspiring article i hoped it would be. And it was.

Downsized Games is a group of 4 people, previously employees of Pandemic who got shut down … well, not the people but the company, although the downsizing effect obviously has been a huge wake-up call for them. As Manny Vega puts it:

“You can see when developers are just making games for the paycheck, and no matter how skilled they are the game lacks that ‘sparkle.’ If we ever get to that point, I hope EA buys us for a ton of money and then shuts us down. It’s a hell of a wake-up call.”

I can totally understand them poking fun at EA and the person we only know as “JR”. The mystical ruler of the empire if you will. The one and only. He, who we would be watching on Livestream when he gave his quarterly earnings speech to the company. A ghostly appearence of the man we never knew. Joking aside, what i found interesting during my time at EA is how my colleagues started making fun of him in a way that was both ridiculing yet still expressed admiration. Maybe that’s because he was never as blatantly evil as that other man Bobby Kotter. Or it was because he was a good man fighting a lost cause. Or none of that. In any case i remember that he was present throughout, everyone knew who he was and they were talking about him or what he had said or done. Sometimes his image was used for evil purposes, like if you wanted a colleague to do something and who then pointed to JR’s image on the wall – where he was portrayed smiling and looking handsome – then saying in a creepy, mysterious voice: “Oh no, i can not do so, the JR would not want this.”. All in good fun without hard feelings – as far as i can tell. I bet it must be a whole different story for the people at Infinity Ward though. I can only hope for them to find the necessary comical relief in a common enemy but their target is too easy, i just hope they don’t fall for the dark side.

Err, anyway, as far as i’m concerned, i can’t wait to see their game BulleTrain hit the App Store. Because there we have another couple of former EA game developers who suddenly start doing their own thing and learn how many details go into making even the simplest of games. Our Black Hole game is no exception and i just hope that in April we’ll finally see it on the App Store – it has been basically finished since i don’t know … probably at least 3 months if not more. But we still keep working on it on the side whenever we find the time to implement required changes, fixing bugs and doing the final polish to a codebase that – admittedly, looks nasty to me now. It was a learning process after all, and not just learning the iPhone platform or the iPhone SDK but also Objective C and the cocos2d engine, Xcode, the Mac OS and above all trying to start a venture-capital funded game development business.

Here’s to Downsized Games. Cheers, guys! Game long and prosper!

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How long it really takes to upgrade your system

On 03.18.10, In My Experience, My Rants, by GamingHorror

So, finally i needed to upgrade my Mac mini to the latest Snow Leopard OS to be able to develop apps for the iPad. Now i’ve heard before that the system update is really easy and quick. However, i’ve worked with computers and people for a long time, and they’re all Liars! People especially, as we all know from Dr. House.

But even before that i knew that people don’t really give good estimations about time or distance, unless they have really measured it themselves. Which, normally they don’t. They put the upgrade disc in, press upgrade, watch a TV show or play with the cat and when they come back – oh wow – it’s already finished, so it must have been quick. To give you a real-life example that i’m sure a lot of you will relate to, is when you ask people how much time it takes from here to get to there. Like, how far is it to the next Autobahn (german highway)? “Oh, that’s just 5 Minutes.” … but when i was driving that route every day and decided to watch the clock the best time i could achieve under the best of circumstances was 12 minutes. For some people, that’s still just 5 minutes of course. Especially if they just drive the route once a month, that little bit of underestimation doesn’t have a dramatic effect. It’s a different story if you’re “missing” those 7 minutes twice a day because it’s your way to work. Even worse if they say you can get from here to there in 30 minutes, when that time is only the time it takes you from here’s Autobahn access point to there’s Autobahn access point.

Now, luckily we don’t upgrade our systems every day but that also makes us prone to misjudgements, like the aforementioned “it’s really quick and painless” words about the Snow Leopard system upgrade. So i decided to clock how long it took me to upgrade my 2 GHz Mac mini with 2 GB – so certainly one of the slower in the Intel line of Macs but nevertheless surprisingly efficient to work with:

  • 25 Min. – full system backup because you never (!) know
  • 90 Min. – install Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.0 from DVD
  • 5 Min. – fix “where is System Events?” issue
  • 5 Min. – Mail converting database
  • 15 Min. – fix display issue (2nd Monitor not recognized, needed several reboots)
  • 30 Min. – install iPhone SDK 3.1.3 for Snow Leopard
  • 5 Min. – install iPhone SDK 3.2 beta for Snow Leopard – FAIL: requires OS Update
  • 30 Min. – download & install Mac OS X 10.6.2 update
  • 30 Min. – install iPhone SDK 3.2 beta for Snow Leopard
  • 5 Min. – download & install another Mac OS system update
  • 30 Min. – fixing broken Keyboard Layout of my german Microsoft Natural Keyboard

Now i’m good to go. The system update itself took 90 minutes which by itself isn’t really what i call fast for a system update, i was expecting more like 20-30 minutes at most to still consider it “fast”. But what many people often forget, as in live, in driving to the Autobahn, in installing systems and system updates and of course in Software Development are the “little details”. The things that we still need to do besides the big chunk to get where we want to. For example, the 12 minutes to the Autobahn makes 24 minutes a day but still many people only seem to count the 30 minutes you spend on the Autobahn itself – often than can be as little as 50% of your time spent driving! The same happens to software developers as well, forgetting about how much time it costs not to build the application but to test and polish it and fixing bugs before it can be released. That could also easily amount to 50% of your development time as well.

In case of this system upgrade, i count a total of exactly 4 hours 30 minutes until my Mac was in a state that i could continue working with it – assuming that i was always there on spot to issue the next step. I wasn’t, so those are rough times. Overall i started the process at 13:00 and was finished at 18:00 – an hour more and maybe i should count that as well. After all, what good are the optimum times if i’m not likely to achieve those? So 4 or 5 hours, that’s at least half a day’s work. In other words, depending on what hourly rate one takes, it created costs of somewhere between €200,- and €350,- (about $270 to $470). That’s neither fast nor cheap. I expected my system to be upgrading and installing for 2 hours – i totally underestimated. In part because i probably heard too many people say “it’s fast and painless”.

Next time, do all of us a favor, and take measurements!

Regardless of whether you make statements about how long the Snow Leopard system upgrade took, how long it takes to get to the Autobahn, or from A to B, and how much time you spent developing this piece of software. Of course, if you could provide us with a frame of reference, that would be great! Your system specs for example, or the kind of car you drive, which route you take and what your driving style is. Or, how experienced your team is in developing that kind of software, how long they’ve been working together and what processes are being used.

But, those are just details, right?

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MIX-MAX is in the App Store!

On 03.17.10, In Announcements, My Experience, by GamingHorror

Get it while it’s still free (until March 22nd)!

I worked on MIX-MAX from January 18th to March 12th 2010. Overall i recorded 95 hours in Acunote or 190 Pomodoros. More realistically it was likely a little more than 100 hours because i didn’t track the final polish phase as accurately and helped to overcome the usual App Store submission & iTunes Connect issues.

Initially i scheduled the project at 80 hours which was realistic until two late change requests added an additional 20 hours on top of it. It was to enable changing the language in all screens and we had to add a few more animals, which meant that the animals could no longer be neatly numbered from 1-26 (A-Z) in code. That meant that i had to change the data format so that animals from each language could refer to the counterpart in the other language even though they’re stored at a different index internally, since, for example, the Jellyfish is called “Qualle” in german and starts with a different letter. As a consequence i had to refactor a good amount of code and re-test everything.

There are two conflicting facts i extract from this:

A late change during software development is a lot more expensive than if the change were introduced in the design phase or an early stage of development. That unfortunately lead some to believe that excessive up-front planning is the way to go and created some of the most dreaded software-engineering practices of mankind (aka Waterfall combined with extensive documentation). Up to the point when Agile Development first showed up and embraced change.

What is more important is what Mary Poppendieck once said: “A late change in requirements is a competitive advantage”. And it is, in this case it made MIX-MAX a better product. Although what she was really referring to was the ability to change requirements late in development, not that any late change is necessarily a good thing.

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Can too much production kill your productivity?

On 02.23.10, In My Experience, My Rants, by GamingHorror
Note: for some reason, this post was stuck as a draft since April 2009 – just to put this into better perspective, i was still working at EA Phenomic at the time.

Yes, it can. My humble opinion. No, actually, this is my conviction.

I’m not talking about crunch time. About taking on too much work so that everyone has to work overtime. I am talking about planning for (or having to plan for, or simply doing) too much production in order to get all the work done in time, so that most everything else falls by the wayside.

This is my experience which i’ve had confirmed today during an interesting conversation at work. With “experience” i mean that if you work at a larger company you can – depending on the work you do – easily dig into your own line of work and forget everything around you. That isn’t something that gets planned but it’s easy to fall into this mode if everyone around you is swarming around like a busy bee-hive and you just want to get your own damned work done. But, it’s crucial to regularly lift up your head and ask what’s going on. If, company-wide, no such time is planned in and certainly no one cares to stop and look around, watching, listening, mentoring, let alone “leadershipping” then that’s the model most people will follow, eventually. That or busting their heads together. Busy worker bees.

Or so it seems.

What it doesn’t say is that people aren’t bees. They have needs for communication, for understanding and learning. People want to get feedback, they want to participate, they want to be asked and decide for themselves. However, working in a Bee hive accomplishes only work. Communication – and that is my experience – falls completely by the wayside except for the one focused on the work at hand. Some may glee over this perceived efficiency. But i can tell you – it is not an experience that creates happyiness ever-after. The counterweight that communication whole is that all the good ideas, the criticism and desires are shared like outbursts, at the wrong time, with the wrong people, or both. There’s only two options: eat it, or die.

It’s a slow process. Something like that frog put into cold water and heating it until it boils. He won’t jump out – only if the water was hot from the start. What happens is that unless you are fortunate enough to be able to work (mostly) in isolation on isolated parts of the game on your own accord, you are drained into this whole hive of swarming bees. Everyone wants a part of me, it seems. Since everyone is so busy, communication is focused on the essential. Like robots. Only that feelings still get hurt.

It gets worse if the communication fails to instill ownership or a time frame. You can be certain that phrases like “We’ll talk about it this week.” will be the last thing you’ve heard about this topic for the week. Responsibility goes down the drain – unless you have to be responsible. It’s simple and effective – being bombarded with work can make you …. work. Work hard. So hard, in fact, that communicating, cooperating, getting an agreement with other people seems like a drag you want to avoid. As much as possible. Just like everything else that isn’t directly beneficial to your work. Helping others, especially mentoring or training. Offering opportunities for growth and learning. Career planning. And so on.

As a side note: even the busiest bee-hive couldn’t survive for long if the bees would stop their intricate communication dances. With a company, you’ll know that something’s up when the communication still happens but goes sour very quickly, and there’s a lot of talking behind closed doors, respectively awkward silence when you enter a room.

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Making a living (gladly) as an iPhone freelance programmer

On 02.20.10, In My Experience, by GamingHorror

At the moment my first project with Ravensburger Digital is being tested. I’m eagerly awaiting feedback and if all turns out well it could be ready for release next week. In the meantime i’ve sent out 3 more project proposals, i have at least two others yet to be done, then there are two promised and three ongoing talks for potential projects or cooperations, former colleagues would like to hire me for an incredibly interesting project and finally there’ll be a minor update for 51 Japanese Characters coming soon and we’re thinking about potential spinoffs and cooperations to create a “Characters” series. There’s one more option to consider still: making a living on the iPhone App Store by publishing my own game(s). All i really need for that is some spare money to pay someone else to create art and audio for me. I’m also looking into proposing a business opportunity to a 3rd party whose work i admire and adore – so yet another option, this one i follow through simply out of sheer interest in the product that particular company creates – and it’s got nothing to do with computer games at all!

Overall i’d say i really enjoy being in such high demand, and i feel kind of bad already that i’ll eventually have to choose between some of these outstanding proposals. If i could clone myself i think i’ll need more than just one clone. I’m actually considering something similar to what Dr Touch is doing: a band of freelance game programming brothers working under one name and distributing the workload based on qualification, free time and interest in the project. In the long run it could lead to me actually starting a game programming service company, who knows? But let me not get ahead of myself, i’m still working on the base technology for my cloning facility.

I really, and i mean really, wonder why none of my other colleagues have chosen to go that road? I have some thoughts … because those were mine and i do what everyone does: i conclude that what i experience, others experience as well.

When i was first thinking to work as freelancer in late 2009, i expected to spend most of my time alone, to be disconnected from the people i have to rely on to get a job. To have a huge problem reaching out to contacts and getting them interested, or simply making new contacts. My worst imagination had me begging for projects for low prices just so i could sustain a living. But to the contrary, now i could easily find enough work for two. I’m lucky that i know some people who do have the contacts and that’s just as important as having the contacts yourself. And the payment … well, i’m currently expecting to earn more than in my last year as an employee with bonus program and stock options. But of course i have higher running costs as well.

I also worried about all the extra costs a freelancer has, and all the paperwork it involves. Especially considering taxes, and paying them monthly in advance. Let alone the process of registering a business and running it properly, with all the legal and tax issues to be considered. It turns out that a helpful tax consultant is worth a lot – if only to take away those uncertainties and worries. Yes, i just spent an hour filling out my first tax form – and 15 minutes on the phone with my tax consultant to make sure i’m making the important checks and correct entries that are in my best interest. Time well spent.

In addition i was put off by certain internet platforms  offering work for freelancers. I get a daily summary of jobs offered and over the last 2 months there have been only 2-3 iPhone programming jobs offered. The rest required absurd skills in insurance policies, high-technology systems, low-level engineering, highly specialized areas of expertise – it’s all about buzzwords like Kordoba, SAP BPS, CATS, ABAP-OO, SOA/ESB, Microsoft SCCM, Citrix, PL/SQL, HFM, PMO and roles like Process Analyst, IT Security Manager, Online Banking System Expert, Solaris Administrator, Oracle Consultant and of course the obligatory Business Analyst. Definetely not the kind of jobs i would know anything about. And that painted a skewed picture of demand – if you look in the right places, or advertise yourself in the right places (such as the cocos2d forum through which i got 2 contacts) and have the right contacts in your business it does become obviouswhat the answer to the question “What should we call a developer who concentrates on developing for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad?” is: in demand!

I’m still accepting offers and i’m always happy to talk about potential cooperations – if you think that’ll be interesting for you, check out my application website with CV and references. After all: more options means i can get to choose the best job at the right time.

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