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Game Development

Correctness > Speed > Cost

As the game nears completion I’ve been working with a lot more people lately. If you asked me to sort these people in terms of how useful they are the sort would go first by correctness, then by speed, then by cost. Correctness is something I haven’t considered much until now because I took for […]

As the game nears completion I’ve been working with a lot more people lately. If you asked me to sort these people in terms of how useful they are the sort would go first by correctness, then by speed, then by cost. Correctness is something I haven’t considered much until now because I took for granted that people generally got the job done right. While this is true on a very high level, on a low level certain people tend to cause a lot of problems for simple tasks while others can do reasonably complex tasks right the first time.

Some examples over the last week:

Bad: Today I spent the entire day doing level design. This was because the artist who was doing it did it wrong twice in a row, and it was so wrong it was less trouble to do everything myself than to try to explain why.

Average: Three times in as many days I had to have some outsourcing programmers make changes to the GUI for the autopatcher. This cost me a total of about an hour explaining the same thing over and over again (Document, match my coding conventions, no Hungarian notation). It would have cost me a lot of money too, but this was a fixed price contract to another company so it cost them instead.

Good: The sound artists noticed I was using FMOD so asked to use FMOD designer so they could do a better job of starting and stopping sounds on events, rather than just hard stopping as I was originally planning to do. Their solution was more correct than mine, so I ended up with a better game.

When you account for this and for speed, the cheaper guys aren’t any cheaper. You really do get what you pay for.

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