You haven't lived in the modern corporate world until you've had a meeting about a meeting

Act Man included a clip from this video in a video of his, so I came to check out the full thing. I was not disappointed. You are very well-spoken and incredibly knowledgeable. Great video!

Yep. I think Starfield is a perfect example of what an enormous budget and a paralyzing amount of caution gets you. Bethesda took zero risks, and the game is bland as hell.

This resonates so much for me. I changed jobs from an indie studio to a "AAA" one and now, a lot of things that I would just try before, now feel almost impossible. I'll have to talk an convince so many people to try something, that I'm starting my own indie studio.

A friend of mine is a film journalist. A few weeks ago he said casually that he waits to see what the general hype and consensus is around a film before he writes the review. I said "Do you need to watch the film for that? And furthermore that isn't much of a review" he explained that nobody would read his review if it didn't echo the consensus. I was rocked to my core and left the conversation with no respect for his vocation at all. It is the same everywhere is what I've seen since, nobody has their own opinion anymore and they don't even realise it. They literally wait to see what their opinion should be based on what others think EVEN if they are a professional opinion maker.

I've seen teams where The Boss would reject people's unsolicited ideas and prototype features so often that everyone just either stopped trying to contribute ideas or would look for approval at every turn in order to shield themselves from the frustration of wasted enthusiasm.

I was very lucky to have a game dev professor at UCSC who warned all his students that this is the life of working for a triple A game dev studio. Avoided the industry like the plague despite majoring in game design, turned out to be an amazing hobby and now I work for a mid sized software company and have so much more freedom than I ever would have imagined

What we've been seeing is people who have never played a video game in their lives buying into game companies and dictating what they do. They pump money into dead on arrival projects that may or may not ever be completed and when they realise they have no market for these projects, a whole chain of layoffs and closures ripple through the entire company and its subsidiaries. As a developer you can do everything right and make great games, but if you're owned by people who have no idea what they're doing then all of a sudden your next project could be your last.

I think this is why we see such stellar indie games - they aren't design by committee, and profits aren't the primary driving force.

This isn't just game development, I think across tech industries this is happening. People are just more risk averse, its likely because society at large is more anxiety ridden than before, and companies are bigger and bigger like you mentioned.

I've seen similar caution in completely non-gaming adjacent industries as well that started springing up around 2010 and it used to drive me mad. It's a skill in itself to learn to navigate with and around this while not getting bitter or taking it out on juniors as this is all they know. Great insight as usual.

I definitely noticed this while being at a game development school. There was a constant push for meetings to talk about every little thing and using soft gloves for handling development problems. I recall one meeting in particular where my group had to pick a reference game and despite having talked about the topic for several days, the meeting still lasted for several hours with zero movement happening, yet we still had a bunch of notes that needed to be written. When I saw how bad the mood got I just decided that enough was enough and took over as the typewriter. We finished the meeting in less than half an hour after that. There is very little risk taking nowadays that is driven by passion. I'd like to see more of that too.

Hey Tim, I work in the non-game segment of software development. We see expanding time estimates as well and I think it's a push back against being measured. People pad because it's really hard to shut someone down after you've agreed to an estimate, and they go on to change the scope. We've all had our share of one line Jira tickets that that have ballooned in complexity as new requirements have been "discovered".

This doesn't exist only in Game Development. Progamming in all enterprise sectors has gotten like this, the last years. My personal opinion is that bad management is mostly to blame for that. As devs are being blamed for missing deadlines and/or other work related issues, the defence (caution) increases proportionally. Even if you yourself aren't a bad manager, past experiences and/or stories build this up. [Spiros/Reckless]

This creates more opportunities for indies. If it takes the AAA people 4 weeks to do an hours work, then even their massive army of workers may not be able to complete with a solid, well rounded, indie developer.

Your stories about yelling with Leonard remind me of Richard Feynman. He talks a lot about not being intimidated by other physicists-he was like 24 when he started working at Los Alamos, and he would happily jump into any conversation happening around him and was fearless about calling an idea stupid or impractical. Apparently Niels Bohr took note and noticed that Feynman was the only one who would push back on his ideas, and started specifically asking for him to be included in discussions. He wasn't causing drama-he was getting stuff done. Sounds like those meetings (and yours) were lots of fun. You also make an excellent point about journalism. Reviews are not nearly as good now. They tend to focus on the same elements, they criticize things I generally don't care about (frametrates), and they give lower scores to games that fail a benchmark, regardless of whether the game is any good or not. Exoprimal got savaged in reviews, and it's one of the best games I've played this year. Not sure what the answer is here, but I hope journalism finds a way out of that, because I think the long-term feedback loop of that will result in games that are bland and much less fun (but can hit 120fps at 4k, wooo).

I think big teams or things that are incredibly structured/process driven run into this. Team gets big, no longer have the average level of expertise or trust you used to, things get turned into soulless process docs. You get a task, think it will take you 1 work day, but realize if you run into something unexpected it may take a week. If you put 1 day on a estimate, and you miss, you affect your performance review. If you put 1 week, do it in a day, your metrics look great! Bad KPIs/incentives screw stuff up. Small teams where you can trust people to just do a thing are so much more productive on a per worker basis.

Oustanding video and perspective, Tim. I retired from the USAF last year. My mentors taught me the same principles you described here, only in the fighter aircraft generation field. Over the years I took part in many aggreesive debates concerning management of a fleet of aircraft or warfighting. These debates were always full of passion, but never personal. We were all trying to get to a better place even though many disagreements were encountered. The key was they were never personal. My main lesson for the new generation is to develop your emotional intelligence. Strive to be even keeled, avoid the temptations of apathy and misplaced anger. Life is good and work is rewarding if you allow it to be. I'd work with or for you anytime on anything because the accountable environment you seem to create is one I love and where I thrive.

I can't fathom the first story with the guy saying that it will take 4 weeks to code the aggression table. I mean, I don't work in game development, I'm a tax consultant. But it sounds to me like I receive a basic tax return from a client, as simple as can be, and tell the client it will take a month to get it back to him, when all I would have to do is fill in his information within not even an hour.

I've worked as QA at AAA studios for 9 years and everything you said hits the nail on the head

The term I've heard using for that is "analysis paralysis". I've worked on projects where the "analysis" portion took way too long and prototyping was seen as a part of development, not a part of proof. What usually adds to that is people that think "good criticism" is "finding reasons not to do something". People who desperately cling to "holes" they found in a design feature as reasons to prolong the analysis, not understanding that sometimes things have pros and cons - and its the game design pillars that tell you the pros are worth the cons.

these videos have become part of my daily routine, I've never worked in the industry but your stories are so interesting

Terrific stuff! Started gaming at around 1993-4, and for many years I truly felt like game developers actually talking to me via the game. I felt like they are my older friends, and the games were made for me. With so much years of gaming, I - like many "old time" gamers, so experienced in games, that I can often tell my kids where and when things in their game will happen BEFORE they get there. I know games, I feel games, and I can read how the game was done. And what I see in most of today's big games - is sad, worrisome and sometimes disgusting. Maybe once or twice I considered a thought that its just me - you know, the usual "nah, its just you getting older, grumpier and just stupider. Its only nostalgia talking" -- all that stuff. But no - I know myself, and I trust in my common sense enough to see that its AAA companies and journo-suckups that are problematic, not my view. And to see it pretty much confirmed by industry's legend - is truly a blessing. Timothy, DesignerDave - and I believe others will appear soon. Thank you for great games of our youth, and thank you for being honest!

my biggest takeaway after this is just that i need to keep pushing with my own game projects, honestly. thought inducing, but also weirdly inspirational. thank you for the video about your insights, we're all forever in debt for your contributions to the game world ❤

Frankly I think software development projects have simply bloated to a point where this kind of thing is inevitable. Small teams could make amazing games even in technical sense back in the 90's and early 00's. It would be neat to see if people could accept less demanding assets, if it meant that games could come out with features in and bugs out within 2 years.

I miss the spirit of the era of gaming around 2000. There were a lot of interesting ideas from big developers - Sacrifice, Typing of the Dead, Majesty. I'm not sure we'll ever see a AAA game with that kind of experimentation again anytime soon. I guess maybe tastes have changed, but I think the caution you're talking about here is also a good explanation.

Hope Tim keeps making these videos for a long, long time. Very insightful, very articulate, just great little diary entries, if we can call them that.

What a fascinating insight into the inner workings of major game development! Thanks for this.

AAA gaming is dead and passionless - confirmed.

The stories are so fascinating please give us more. It's extremely rare that we get a look into the workplace dynamics of tech/creative industries for large projects like yours.

I can relate to Tim's stories. The most egregious example I have is when I asked our lead programmer for a simple straight line to be drawn between nodes when we were working on a map. He game back with an estimate of three weeks. Three weeks, just to get our engine to render straight lines! Thing is, I learned that this wasn't just caution, it actually WOULD take a considerable amount of time to get that feature into production, because it would have to be merged up into the engine branch and then the engine changed would be pulled back down into our project. And there was a different team working exclusively on the engine. I think a big part of why we're seeing these inflated estimates is not just caution, it's that it ACTUALLY takes long to do them due to needlessly complicated team and project structures. Yes, you need rigid & complex structures in AAA studios with hundreds (or thousands) working on a single game, but when you're a small studio with a project team of under 10 people, copying these structures (because you want to be professional after all!) does more harm than good.

Hey Tim, thanks for sharing this insight. I’m enrolled in a game business program right now and I think this is extremely valuable information for people in the industry to take note of. Helps to hear this at the beginning of my journey!

I think you brilliantly articulated the problem of modern games: there's just no soul. I can go back and play many games from the 90s/00's where you can feel the passion from the development teams oozing directly into the experience.

I have heard about these "oh yeah, that will take at least 4 weeks" company dynamics. Sounds horrifying and mindnumbing, sitting there 3.9 weeks doing nothing. I think it comes about when a task is marked as "1 day", it takes 2, then the manager gets angry and demands better estimates. From then on all 1 day tasks are assigned 2 and the problem goes away until one of those 2 day tasks takes 3 and the manager is back. Very weird spiral, which ends in everyone on the team perpetuating a false narrative, lying to themselves and others and watching youtube 90% of their working time. Sounds heavenly to slackers, but your programming skills will atrophy faster than you think. You'll be unemployable after such a job.

Dude I wanna reach through the screen and give you a big hug. Feeling this so strongly these days and I would even add that caution goes to publishing and investment/acquisition. Fabulous video and it seriously made my week to hear a great industry steward spouting truth.

Oh Tim, if only you knew. All software development is like that. This attitude is a response to metrics and corporate meddling. Managers that have no idea how software works end up telling developers how to do their work. So they end up padding everything because they don't want to be held accountable for something that's often trying to fit a square peg into a circle.

I work in an engineer for a large complicated system involving hardware and software development. You have hit the nail on the head, i think these are really astute observations that apply to any sort of development/engineering environment

I think as players we've always had a suspicion that game dev culture has changed over the years but that little anecdote about how passion over your work is perceived as threatening is really elucidating. Like because your working in a cubicle, caring about your work in that way isn't allowed, both in terms of the work environment (Which presumably became much more proffesional over the years),and the games themselves. It's probably a reflection of the "industry" in games industry being calcified. And in that sense it would be a bit odd to be getting excited over data management or some equivalent because the stakes are percieved to be so low.

Thank you for sharing these stories with us, Mr. Cain. It's both eye-opening and thought-provoking.

Loved this! It was like I was listening to my double, but from a tech industry point of view. I used the exact same processes with the whiteboard priority approach, the passionate meetings (intense solution initiatives), pseudo code walkthroughs to support rapid prototyping so we could quickly explore yay/nay decision making, constant end user stakeholder engagement to maintain buy in ensuring support staff feel part of the product and feel responsible for its success. I started to realise I was quickly becoming what is probably now referred to as a "Generalist" and my approach was now at odds with the industry standards that support very specific roles to support planning and scale, but often lead to excessive bureacracy and caution. A generalist drives a car, but the new industry standards would have somebody responsible for the steering wheel, and another responsible for the gearstick etc. The industry is sold on this approach thinking it ensures accountability and redundancy, but in reality it often just leads to an increase in bottlenecks and a rapid loss of product value and money. Funny thing, I also moved my whiteboard approach to many confluence pages that for a long time where met with indifference but I see they are now being used for insights and inspiration, years later.

As a software engineer I feel like every year I get less productive (across different employers, industries and customers). More caution, more process, more tools, more everything to get the simplest change implemented. For every $1 spent it requires like $0.80 guaranteed in overhead just to avoid even the smallest amount of risk or responsibility. And it's not even helping, if everything gets so difficult that nobody wants to fix problems or try different solutions the software gets worse in the end.

This is why i enjoy Indie gaming (despite working at a huge game studio). Allows me to focus on my core audience, given them what they expect or want but also have the possibility to drive the game mechanics, the story and other aspect of development however we please.

I've been a designer myself for the past 6 years, in the industry for nearly 10. Unfortunately what you describe is all I know, and it's hard to stay invested in what I'm doing when I see this kind of mentality surrounding me. I've just moved to a small indie studio of only 3 people (excluding myself) so I'm hoping it will be more like the game development of old, where I get to experience what you and our game dev ancestors had. I want heated discussions because in my experience that's how the product flourishes. Not a cold, passive aggressive teams meeting where everyone hold their cards to their chest. Thanks for this video Timothy, it has affirmed some thoughts I've been having and helped me to understand that it doesn't need to be this way.

I love this video. It's extremely eye opening, and in a lot of way confirm the thoughts I've had about the gaming industry in general, because a lot of these things are happening in other industries as well. If extremely frustrating as someone who enjoys know what I need to do and doing it without having a meeting about what I need to do, and then a meeting about the meeting. I also work harder not smart, and I kmow how long it takes to complete certain projects and I'm going to accurately complete things in the amount of time it's should take. Now I will give myself a few hours buffer because sometimes things happen, but I'm not going to suggest 2 or 3 weeks when I know it will take me a hour. That's just laziness in my book and not wanting accountability. Anyways, great video. You are definitely the type of manager I'd want to work with/for.

"I'M NOT YELLING, I'M JUST PASIONATE!" No really, it's hard to imagine Tim yelling at someone. XD

The biggest lesson I’ve gleaned from this, is that I should focus on hiring hungry, new devs instead of experienced ones, because those experienced ones are going to abjectly waste my time and money on a work ethic that was shaped by a corporation

This line: 7:17 'games have gone from being an expression of an idea like artwork from a particular person or group of people into a corporate driven money-seeking instrument'. That line is fundamental. Great channel. I have gotten more into gave development recently, this really helps me

Thanks. I’ve been working Game Dev at a AAA for about a year now. Your channel definitely provides good insight into the professional community and what to be on the look out for

This is a great video. This subject is going to be on my mind for a while, even with my own personal projects.

Timothy, as a gamer of many years, thank you. This was a fantastic video, great insight, and open and honest which shows your amazing character. I've been gaming since Commadore 64; Fallout was a masterpiece and I'm sad to see where it's fallen short since.

I started in the game industry in 2007, and yes I'm seeing the same. I get why people pad estimates, the "agile" approach and working in sprints and milestones is the main culprit, and leads often don't do anything hands on anymore and are just middle managers

Thank you for getting that off your chest! I am a new gaming UKpostsr who is a magazine editor and designer IRL, and who once owned a local newspaper. Story two reminds me of my young reporters during that time. They always wanted more time to get things done than the elder crew and I knew was necessary-especially with investigative pieces-largely, I think, because of the risk involved. UKposts recommended your channel to me because I'm currently playing Fallout 3 on my channel, and I'm glad it did! Thanks for the insight. Thanks also for the videos about the original Fallout's development, and for making the game in the first place. I always put a small message of thanks to you in my video descriptions for Fallout. A commentary playthrough of the original is on my production calendar for next year, and I'm looking forward to revisiting it after 26 years. Have a great day!

i love jank in games, typically not for the jank itself but for all that charm you mentioned that tends to accompany the jank. it's interesting how the general experience of long time gamers parallels the change in attitudes of developers you talked about. games like Baldurs Gate 3 that have charm and ambition and take risks are beyond uncommon these days

Love the stories. Been doing games since 2005 and definitely feel ya on this. In particular I find its really hard to get people to build the most sketch of a sketch of a feature first. People want to do it "right" but then we almost always change it so much that the time spent on "right" leads to even slower itteration on the next phase because it was built so "solid" for the old spec. Not sure how to change that pattern.

Thank you for your candor. I feel your frustration and I see it in IT industry all the time. I loved all your games and I look forward to everything you make.

Not sure, but I've been in gaming and this feels a bit biased. I get Tim’s points, but let’s talk about the other side too. 1) If a team is using Jira for tasks and bugs, adding a whiteboard will cause fragmentation. They already prioritize in Jira, so a whiteboard just splits focus. Having a top 10 list that producers check and assign to their teams seems more logical. Instead of you the director chasing each dev down, which is wierd in large teams where you don’t know every dev personally. The producers come in and help bridge the gap between directors and devs. In smaler teams where you know each dev, it's easier to talk to each one personally. But with the director role, and large teams, people are going to look at you differently. Did you know the programmers on a more personal level? 2) Some code may be quick to write, but fitting it into existing systems takes time. I'm guessing the team was using UE4 and had their workflow and pre built systems in place. Adding unit tests, QA, etc., it all adds up. So, you might have gotten your quick fix, but it seems like you might be a bit tough to work with, and thus not hearing about the ripple effects of the change. 3) Passionate meetings. Nah, I got nothing here. Fully agree with Tim here!😂

I cannot believe people would threaten to quit over what we would now call a "radiator". What year was this at Carbine?

Thank you so much for your videos, Tim. They have helped me a lot on reflecting on my own design process. Also thank you for your work in general. Fallout was incredibly influential in my way of thinking growing up, and it is one of the first pieces of art that made me gain an affinity for anarchism and degrowth, which had been guiding principles in my work since.

Glad I've found this channel(thx @AsmonTV). Really nice to have such knowledgeable analysis and insights from within the industry.

Great advice and applies to all devs - I find more "breathing room" in startups where being "reckless" or taking risks is highly encouraged.

I work in IT and this happens there too. In my industry it's because management is increasingly threatening people's jobs for making decisions on their own and working hard. You have to do everything their way and if you don't you could be on the chopping block. Therefore you have to run everything by management or you get the wrong kind of attention.

I had a lead tech that got promoted to manager very young, he was a very bad manager, to the point he got the nickname "The Dictator"... he always said something like: "so strange that you would always take exactly the time you estimated for your development, sometimes you ask for more time, but you never deliver early". I always explained that if I finish early, I did extra testing and polish on all my code, that time was estimated for something initially, but he always wanted to do things faster...

Just realised you were on youtube! Thanks! You made some of my favourite games. I've been gaming for about 4 decades now and they're still favourites.

We live in a fear driven society. A house with fear cannot live side by side with love (passion/creativity/true connections with others). Fear always keeps us chained. We believe things will get better, but it won’t when fear is the foundation for whatever you do in life. Fear lives on a fictional story. A story that has no ending. A story of selfishness and greed. So let’s try to stop this society of fear. Start with small things in your life.❤

This video made me realize what I've been doing wrong when learning to program, I was being too careful to write a good looking code. Thank you for this video Tim!

So I have a few critiques as someone who's worked engineering projects as a worker bee in a sense in today's setting. Now my experience is in mechanical engineering not in coding but I think in terms of project development and management it mostly works to the same process. Story 1: I actually agree with you on this one, maintaining a whiteboard of unfinished tasks is pretty normal and honestly a lot of people I worked with kept a whiteboard on a cubicle wall with their tasks to be crossed off. Anyone could see those lists pretty easily and it made communicating with the boss and teammates easier. It does seem a bit odd to me that it would be contentious but oh well. Story 2: I'm not sure what the experience level of your coworker was when they wanted 4 weeks but clearly it was less than you. Sure you may have written this code 3 times but sounds like chances are they never have so they don't know how long it will take THEM when they account for other tasks they have to do or when they account for how it needs to be implemented in their experience. Personally I've had too many times the old guys will come up and say "this is how we used to do it its so simple" when they haven't actually done the same type of work in over a decade because thats not their job anymore. If you want to pass down how you think it should be done that is a good thing. Send them an example of your past work for them to copy or learn from, or hell if it only takes 45 minutes and you can do it like you said...DO IT and say "I want something like this"... this is how you mentor people and pass down knowledge and experience. Give them a day or so to look at it and then ask their thoughts. What you are describing though is a hostile learning environment where you set an expectation with no flexibility for learning and you will be frustrated if it's not exactly how you wanted it and knock performance review points if thats the case. Story 3: This one isn't so bad except you seem to have an expectation that people would want to join in. Truth is very few younger employees are ever going to be comfortable joining in an argument with the old hats, there is too much at risk for their career. You can't expect them to feel comfortable arguing like that without fostering it first. One way I've had teams foster a healthy dose of this is we would have the more senior (but still non-supervisory) team members setup informal group meetings once a week, so think about 10-15 people lead by guys with like maybe 5-10 years of experience with the rest of the group ranging from 0-5. We would sit for about an hour or however long seemed to make sense and just talk about what we were working on with NO bosses/supervisors/managers whatever you call them in the room. This helped filter down discussion in a relaxed environment and made less confident employees more confident in speaking about their projects. It also helped spread knowledge and experience we each had with our very varied and different projects, keeping us all in the loop. This was particularly helpful since our group was essentially the "miscellaneous projects" group and we needed to have a lot of flexibility and wide breadth of knowledge to function due to a lack of specialization.

I was here at 10k subs, and proud to be here creeping on 50k subs. you rock Tim

Love your work sir ❤ The passion is admirable.

Thank goodness we have the Indie scene to counterbalance this excess of caution.

This is why I'm so enamored with VR right now. So many small teams/studios just giving it their all and experimenting. Yea sometimes there's jank and sometimes the games need a bunch of patches but the teams communicate with the player base on discord servers, and you can tell they just want to make the best game they can. Gotta respect it. Nice too that most VR games are $30 or less. Vast majority of AAA gaming bores me to tears, most games are a total step back from stuff we got on the PS2.

Best Video on UKposts for a long time, accurate and honest! Keep it up

Thank you very, very much, adressing this topic(s). Meanwhile I thought sometimes, that I'm the only one, who has the perception of things going that way. Not only in the games or software industrie as a whole but overall in society. Especially the part where you talked about "yelling at each other without beeing mad, just into it", gave me a big relief because that's my way of discussing topics too. I'm always "very into it" but in the last ten or fifteen years, that as become to be a problem. Glad to not be alone 🙂

As a 3D Artist with almost 9 years of experience I can say this... I remember how excited and full of energy I was when I started my first job in game dev. I was all over the place, hyped, working long hours, trying to be innovative and full of ideas, burning like a torch and you know what? Noone wants you to burn bright like a torch. Noone wants you to be full of ideas, full of energy, innovative and hyped cause for some reason they'll think you're a danger to their status. Game dev is full of jaded old farts who think they are all soooo experienced and all sooo important cause they've been there for years and you're just a noob. They will do everything in their strenghts to extinguish thy flame so that you don't burn brighter than they ever were. If you wanna make it in AAA industry you pretty much have to be jaded just as them and hold your head low so it won't be sticking out too much ready to be shot. All of my ideas were always thrown out to the trash cause "it will take too long", "we don't have a budget for that", "noone at the exec seat will ever agree too that", "it's too unique and risky, we're doing a game for the mass audience", "we just need to stick to what's been done before and is proven to work", "I know you want to be all creative and such, but just follow my order, it will be better this way" yatta yatta yatta.... You get these responses enought times in your carrer and you become just as jaded as them.

Game development is full of people collecting paychecks and not people who are passionate about games, story, or fun.

When you talked about passion you reminded me about someone who told me not to pursue game development out of passion because it doesn't give you a lot of money. That was a year ago and I've been seeing more and more people said the same thing and I can never understand why.

Excellent analysis, Sir! Thank ya, thank ya kindly.

So well said and it applies to any corporate structure these days. The people at the very top have no idea how anything works and slow production down from the top to bottom. No one wants to take responsibility for anything because the goals of the company are so disconnected from reality. Fire people who don't want to take accountability, fire anyone that doesn't understand the process. Pretty simple, but once a company gets big enough it just becomes a web of bad direction and passing accountability.

As a developer I was immediately familiar with the Combat AI story as I was guilty of that kind of thing too more than a few times. I think what happens is that developers all start with the attitude of, yea I can do it in few hours, but inevitably you get your nose bloodied few times and you start quoting for more time and some people even start asking for excessive time. For example, sometimes you say a feature takes few hours to make but then that feature introduces a bug that takes you few hours on its own to fix and it looks like you estimated poorly or don't know what you are doing, or someone asks you for this small random thing and you say yes but they keep changing their mind so in the end 2 hours piece of code takes 2 days because of all the changes, or you say yea I can do it but then your actual line manager says you have to fix this very urgent thing first and at the end of the day it looks like you didn't do this small thing which you promised to do or simply it does happen often times especially in complex codebases where a feature that is very simple on the surface is actually very complex because of all the hidden dependencies or legacy code or such and it looks like you are being unreasonable asking for so much time but actually people just dont know the full scope of everything that is involved. Every developer gets into these situations and eventually they try to get away with asking for as much time as possible just to avoid these painful experiences and yea sometimes people even ask for unreasonable amounts of time. And then as those developers become managers they are just like the manager in your story because they have this attitude of; when I was just a developer I could not push back on all these ridiculous requests but when I will become a manager I will have the power to push back and I will protect my team from all these random requests and get them as much time as I can. People do think that way and sometimes they become unreasonable.

thank you for this talk loved hearing about this totally insane how someone asked for a month to do something that could take an hour

Why are we seeing less passion? We are called more and more by our society to see ourselves from the outside, we have fewer opportunities to exist freely without self awareness. The good part is hopefully fewer encounters with unapologetic mean spirited people, the bad part is never being able to just vibe and obsess about where our train of thought takes us, run in any direction, fearless of the judgement of others. I personally enjoy the company of passionate people, and the passionate ones I don't enjoy I can pretty easily avoid, so the cultural pressure to not offend feels a little like a 80% effort for 20% of potential good.

This is why the Sega Dreamcast will always be one of my top consoles. Sega took so many risks, developers at the time said the company felt like a AAA indy studio. And as can be expected, it sold so poorly it ran them out of the console space.

Tim, I have a friend who worked on the development team at Carbine. He never had anything but glowing admiration and respect to talk about in regards to you, and I know that team really enjoyed working there, despite small squabbles that might have gone on. It was a special place and sadly a kind of studio that's dying out, as you say.

The story of you arguing with other devs, not because of anger but from the shear passion of wanting to make the game better, reminds me of the final panel interview to my first job in games, some years back. The lead dev and CTO got into a heated argument about how to properly implement a serializer. I was soooo tickled by that. I was laughing so hard my eyes started to water. They apparently found my reaction to the situation very endearing, because the next business day (interview was on Friday followed by a holiday weekend). I had a job offer from them in my email. 😂 Part of the reason why I left my last job in games (not the one I spoke of above, but another) was because of how massively siloed design and engineering was. I felt my creativity so deeply constricted. Despite the fact that the team was relatively small and started off as an indie. Most of the decisions were being pushed by Niantic. Bit by bit Niantic began to chisel our game into essentially another PoGo game with a Transformers wrapper. For the last few years I have been building my own game and is my hope to turn this venture into a proper team/studio one day. Nothing comes close to that level of freedom. Building games to me is truly an art, a means by which devs can express themselves. If you can't express yourself in your work, there is no point.

Felt this way for a long time as a gamer since I was 6. Bravo. Thank you.

I'm learning coding right now and honestly I'm pretty optimistic with my mindset being much older, take risks, either it works, or you can try again and know where it went wrong. I don't see being told to do something or figure out a problem as being talked down to or preyed upon. I know if I'm solving a problem, then I solve the problem, ask questions if I need to, and if I don't solve it right, then we can talk it out and we can learn something. I do think Indie studios are ahead of the curve by being more daring, and I think consumers need to be more forgiving when devs "Try" something, the current atmosphere of everything trying to be big ending up as "The blunder of the century" and a source of ridicule and stalking streamers and going "game bad" over and over in chat for 5 hours is, quite frankly, a mental illness and a mass psychosis event. It certainly adds very unnecessary stress. Before I started to learn coding, I always thought everything was very rigid "Only one way to solve any problem", but I've learned so much (And I've learned so little so far) but I've discovered just how much freedom there really is in it, and I feel like a lot of young people in the development space is in this cookie cutter "Follow the instructions on the homework exactly" mindset, as per the eternal student mindset, where you do what your professor wants and no more, trying to strike out on your own or being left with an assignment that isn't perfectly clear is mysterious and dangerous.

Tim! Great lessons. Really enjoyed hearing you talk about this subject. Loved it. Especially the "Who was the Mom and who what the Dad" HAHAHA

if anyone is wondering why games have changed so much this is it. design by committee/analysis paralysis, hyper inflated middle management. it churns senior talent and prevents entry levels from growing. no one is allowed to take risks. every choice goes through 100 people and is picked to death. wish i could break my NDA right now lol but 🤷‍♀

I like the 'wish list' on the blog. Enables the passionate people to step up. Then you get a sense on who you can call on for the very juicy stuff (give them some bonuses when they deliver on your wants, consistently)

So, first of all, this is a great video with lots of great points. I have been in software development for 27 years and I have seen the changes as well. However, it feels like you are assigning blame on the developers, when there are some clear and obvious reasons for how and why developers have been conditioned to have this caution. 1. The planning fallacy. Humans are terrible estimators and we all know this by now. However, miss a deadline and get skewered for it by management and product owners. 2. The culture of blame. I have seen this in nearly every organization these days. You don't want your name publicly listed or called attention to, because if anything goes wrong management is on the hunt for who to blame, even though the focus should be on how to fix whatever the issue is. 3. Iterating costs money and the C Suite doesn't want to "burn" money. So you stick to the board and look for easier, "proven" features. I could write a dissertation on the many other reasons, but the bottom line is that caution now exists where it didn't used to because leadership has conditioned it into developers.

Love, i wholeheartedly agree mate. I work in software and im in s very fluid logistics company right now, it's fantastic. If we need to roll out of a hotfix, it can happen tomorrow kind of thing. My previous company was very much not like this. The GM was the tyrant and everything had to go through him, no matter the department. The software was buggy, releases were slow, everyone was stressed and there was so many meetings. To top it off we were owned by a fortune top 500 company who had a painful HR and there was no room for creativity. I love this message

Just found this channel, and wanted to say that you would be a great mentor.

Thanks Tim. I work in an org and industry that's more like a giant carrier ship where we have to be cautious because of the kinds of data and product we work with and it gets frustrating when you think of solutions but have to wait months for approval or for someone to code, test and then validate before getting what you want. It really shouldn't be so with creative industries I'd say, as much as the business wants to have sure profitable products to give. I'll be angry forever at Sony for shuttering their main risk taking development house Japan Studio. Absolute crime.

Honestly I really liked this video. As a student working towards the goal of being a game designer its very cool to hear an experienced designers thoughts on the workspace and how its changed. I've noticed these changes not even in the game design industry but in general. So much has shifted all around in the last decade that its hard to keep up on and difficult to adjust what you know works, to conform to. Awesome video, for sure subscribing for more of these kinds of thoughts

As a software dev/lead/agile guy of 15+ years (not in the games industry) I recognize a lot of what you are describing. At my current job I see a lot of tasks that gets estimated to take 3-5 days which I would knock out in an afternoon when I was a junior dev. I really do dislike peoples aversion to pushback in modern development. Everything is decided by consensus. If you disagree and you want to have a conversation about it. If you do not do it in the right way you're seen as difficult. To me it is perfectly acceptable to have an 30 minutes discussion about a topic. Explore every part of it. And still disagree at the end of it. This makes people uncomfortable. I don't think this inherent to agile workflows but it is a prevailing culture today. That said today I often find things that I would do in 1 hour to take multiple days using modern tools. There is a lot of benefits with modern framework. But everything today is just a lot more complicated and slower. On top of that when I think back to 10 years ago where I worked in a team of 5 developers for the whole organisation vs today. Where I am one out of maybe 100 developers. I feel like I was 10x more productive 10 years ago. Though I will concede the code we produce today is a lot more stable and easier to modify and work with. I think what a lot of people forget in an agile workflow is that top level management can be considered stakeholders. For your 4 week damage table. I'm sure they've internally discussed it within the implementing team. Probably had a vote about how much time it would take. And from how they view the requirements arrived at what they find to be a reasonable estimation. At this point it would be unreasonable for top level management to go in and directly adjust the time estimation and change nothing else. What makes me frustrated when listening to your story is that the other part seems unwilling to engage in why you are saying 45 minutes and they are saying 4 weeks. If I was a team lead in this situation I would first explain the story as I understand it to you and figure out where the misunderstanding is. Then secondly probably discard the story in our log and start over from scratch. Because clearly the scope of the story is wrong. In this case it seems like they've given up on communication and just want to steamroll what they think is right. I think I understand the pushback you got against the whiteboard. To me it sounds like what you want is a classical continous flow kanban board. Basically a trello page. But making a lot of assumptions you are probably high level management. You probably have some sprint based agile workflow adopted. And you are probably working across multiple teams in a big organisation. So in essence what you are saying is that you want to impose a secondary workflow over your existing workflow (provided my assumptions are correct). If I as a mere developer make commitments to my team, my scrum master in a 2 week sprint. And then on top of that. I also have my name directly written on a whiteboard from top level management. It puts me in an extremely awkward spot where I either commit to the sprint goal or to the directives of a manager. I think the solution you ended up doing was probably the best one. You had a list where you clearly communicated what is important. And then product owners and scrum masters looked at that list and planned the sprints accordingly. As to why no one suggested you to do it this way in the first place. I can't understand. I have to agree that I hate the caution today. I don't even think Agile workflow is that effective for large organisations. Its just that we don't have a better option. And the way things are decided these days just takes a lot of passion out of how development decisions gets made. These days its only about delivering bullet points. Even if the person making the decisions has a great visionary idea. It gets broken down, reviewed and reduced to its minimum viable component before anyone even started coding. 10 years ago. We had conversations like. "Hey man, I tried doing this over the weekend. Have a look at this." and that would lead into a defining feature of the product years down the road. There is no room for that among developers in big organisations.

Thank you, so much. For everything you’ve done. ❤

Thank you for sharing.

this isn't just a thing in the game development sphere, this is the same things that are happening in corporate enterprise development. Recently I was on a project that needed something done quickly, and for me it would take less than a day, but because they don't give me the job to implement it, they have to go to an offshore team of devs, they came back with an estimate measured in weeks. This is becoming more and more commonplace now. Estimates are getting padded out of control. I have no idea what these developers actually do all day, because it doesn't take as long as they say it does.

IMO these issues are all symptomatic of Agile. Agile (or at least a highly bastardized, top-down management driven version of Agile) is now the norm in the software development industry, and it has had disastrous effects upon the workplace, in all of the ways mentioned in this video.

This is great insight and what the people needed. Thank you.

Thanks for making some of my favorite games of my childhood. :)