Software Development

I've been doing professional software development of some kind or another since the mid-90's.  I wrote my first program on a Timex Sinclair when I was 10 years old, and taught myself Assembly to try to squeeze more into the 2K of RAM it came with.

pictured here with the 16K RAM upgrade!!  That changed everything!!

A lot has changed since then (thankfully).  Along the way I learned a lot of lessons--all of them the hard way.  Looking back at my first attempts at building a company, developing a brand, organizing a development methodology and cultivating people I realize I did things about as wrong as I could.

Here are some of those lessons.  Maybe you won't have to learn them the hard way, too...

Produce excellence, especially when you're not asked for it

My first commercial products were euphemistically called "Casual Games" or "Budget Extreme Sports Games" or more correctly "Shovelware".  Google "Extreme Paintbrawl" and read some of the reviews.  Enjoy the laughs and then come on back.

Extreme Paintbrawl and the games like it were precisely what our publisher hired us to do.  One important guy at a publisher told us "You could literally take a shit on the CD and I could sell it with the right licensing, just get them done as fast as possible."  So that's what we did.  We banged out junky games as fast as we could, because that's what we were hired to do.

This kept the lights on, and kept our customer satisfied, but it didn't lead anywhere.  Later on, when we tried to land bigger, higher-quality projects, nobody was interested.  We had a reputation for producing junk games at light speed.  Literally nobody would give us a shot at producing a quality game with more time and more budget.  In retrospect, they were probably right.  We had a shovelware culture and I'm not certain we could have turned the corner.

At the same time, a friend of mine with a very similar company and very similar starting point aligned his people around producing beautiful, compelling games.  He had the same customers, the same deadlines and the same budgets.  They were late all the time, the games were completely over-engineered relative to the spec, and they didn't make any money on those games, but they proved that his group could do really nice work.  They successfully segued into AAA games while I wound up throwing in the towel and leaving the industry.

Get a monkey on a football

On one of my early projects we had to develop a considerable amount of development infrastructure from scratch.  We were building a new rendering engine, new level design tools, new asset management tools and were working out of a basement.  Weeks went by with no visible progress to show the customer.  They started freaking out and threatened to cancel the contract.

I came up with a schedule of visible milestones to deliver to the customer.  For the first one I said "Look, I don't care if we render a monkey riding a flying football around the course, we have to show these guys something!!"  "A Monkey on a Football" became our catch-phrase for tangible customer deliverables that may not be completely required for the technical aspects of the development, but are completely required to make sure that your customers know you're moving forward.

It is a lesson I should have internalized from an earlier interaction with a guy named "Joris" in the Netherlands.  Joris had worked for us before and we hired him to write the AI for Santa in one of our early projects called "Nuclear Winter".  Joris kept telling us he was making progress and we kept believing him without demaning tangible proof.  When the time came for Joris to turn in his code, Joris disappeared.  Then he turned in corrupt zips, then disappeared again.  Eventually, Joris admitted that he hadn't done any work at all.  He had spent his entire advance on phonesex with some woman in Kansas that he was in love with and he needed more money from us and then he promised he would get right to work.  

So now, I always demand a monkey on a football from the folks who are working on my team, and I always give a monkey on a football to my stakeholders.

I have a few more, but my blogging time is up for this week... I'll post them another time.