building blocks...

I remember when my son was much younger he used to like me to build him a tall tower of wooden building blocks which he would then knock down...he loved it so much that he started to get impatient as i was building the tower and would knock it down halfway through...half the blocks, half the noise, half the fun right?

so i would try and get him to hold off until i'd finished building but i wasn't always successful...certainly when i managed to keep him at arms length then the tower was awesome and the fun was at maximum...but whenever i failed to keep an eye on him and he did manage to interfere too much thenultimately we both failed to deliver the best experience in the time allowed...

hmmm...

polish...

recent analogy told to me by one of my team...

"its like we've got this cake, on the outside it's a little bit burnt in places and a bit dry but on the inside its still a little raw...we really need to cut the burnt bits off and get the cake back in the oven to finish it off properly...but they're all there with hands full of cake decorations and icing bags at the ready...i wanna shout "stop! its not ready yet guys!"...no-one wants to eat bad cake no matter how good it looks!"

I like the analogy...I especially like my team using analogies on me! :)

last minute changes?

when recently discussing the types of changes feasible at the later stages of a project, someone told me about Peter Jackson working on the final audio mix just two days before the world premier of Fellowship of the Rings...can you guess why this story was told to me?of course! they wanted free reign to chop and change stuff regardless of how close a major deadline was...

as a counter to this view however, i remember hearing a story about a bloke whose airplane was in a little trouble, he had no parachute but still chose to jump out at 1000ft and take his chances rather than try and land the plane safely...luckily for him he fell over a 1000ft but managed to land in a rather large fir tree and so got away with a just few broken bones...good work fella!

The moral of this is that just 'cos one person managed to do the impossible doesn't make it the sensible option...one swallow doesn't make a summer and all that...

who makes the Pachinko machine?

So here's a question, if production is the tray at the bottom catching all the balls...then who makes the machine?

i reckon its production who makes the machine. we basically define the processes that hopefully mean all the balls get caught ont he way down so really its our own fault ifwe end up with a tray of shite...

so what does that mean? i think, as production, we need to be constantly looking at our machine and improving it and repairing it...and most importantly, every time a ball ends up in our tray at the bottom we need to work out how it got there and fix the machine so it hopefully won't happen again...

production...

trying to describe what production does...

"it's like one of those Japanese pachinko machines where the balls are all the risks, issues, tasks and general crap. they all bounce down through the system and most of them find a handy little home. but not all the balls are safely caught and they end up in the tray at the bottom. production are the guys that deal with those balls. production deals with everything no-one else wants to!"

what should we polish?

trying to finish a game...

"so they're all standing around a car. its fucking filthy. its like the ghost of Colin McCrae has come back and had a spin through a shit factory in it. they're all furiously buffing away at one of the wing mirrors. i mean this is the shiniest most polished wing mirror you've ever seen in your life. every so often one of them steps back and admires what they've done but every time they notice a tiny streak or blemish and start again with the polish and furious buffing.

all the time i'm standing there, watching and wondering why i'm the only one worrying about how we get the rest of the fucking car clean..."

first post...welcome...

argh...first post scariness...guess its a bit like doing anything for the first time, it seems a lot harder than it is but the more you do it the easier it becomes...

so i work in games development...lucky ol' me...in the main its one of the best fucking jobs in the world...but not all day, every day...in fact there are times when i'd rather lick cat vomit off a dog's arse and wish i could have a simple job and only have to worry if someone wanted fries or not...at those times, when things seem so daunting and impossible i find it helps to use complex and quite frankly rubbish analogies and annecdotes to ease the pain...

so whilst i'd love to say what the definitive idea of this blog is going to be...i just don't fully know yet...what i want to do is to track all the development experiences here as some kind of rant blog...it'll keep me sane...

gonna try and keep this anonymous to protect the innocent...