I get you. I was a game developer a couple of lifetimes ago. I once had to investigate and fix a bug called "HANDBAG TURNS INTO A BANANA". Never had anything like that in the corp world :_(

Hang in there. We once had a bug "PRODUCT IMAGE TURNS INTO A DOG" due to some code that kept falling back to an embarrassing placeholder.

In my very first developer job, I was creating a backend for a social media-type phone app. This was sort of a skunk works project that the founder and "Chief Innovation Officer" of a successful company wanted to do on the side, but he only had the budget for a couple of juniors.

Anyway, I didn't know a lot of things, so at one point I got the test environment and production environment tangled up in the code. I don't even remember the details of this confusion and I'm not sure I'd be capable of understanding how this was possible, but the long and the short of it is that one time the boss came down and asked something like "Why am I a horse?", and the answer was that he was being logged in as a user on the test environment which had a name that was a horse pun and a horse for a profile picture. Fun times.

Had 'under strained conditions, debug console comments negatively about your mother.'

A debug line someone thought wouldn't ever see the light of day.

I think "Right-click, see spiderman" was the highlight of my career.

"Title name says POOP" cca. 2006

Reminds me of the interview with Tarn Adams from Dwarf Fortress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY

is it more stressful working on games than in the corp world?

I have never had a job that wasn't at least games adjacent, but I expect the comparison is not that clear. There is a huge diversity of commercial game development, just as there is for commercial software development generally. On average game development is probably more stressful because: it is an entertainment product in addition to being a piece of software; the funding models for independent game developers are often project based, which can lead to a lot of instability.

There are corners of game development that are more "chill" than others. Studios doing work-for-hire for other projects can build sustainable businesses. People in the "serious" game and simulation space seem to have a pretty normal work experience. Likewise shared tech teams at the biggest publishers/developers are more insulated from business variability and shifting project deadlines.

Ask CDPR developers.

It seems like bigger game companies push for lots of crunch and are more stressful, while smaller companies and indie dev teams are more relaxed.

This is all anecdotal from interviews, news, etc that I've seen.

of course it's going to vary, but yes.

I don't know if the new development model of "hit release date and fix everything after we sell the DLC" has made this better or worse.

You can still write a fully working page with a body but without a head, and a parent can do whatever it wants with their children, destroy them if necessary... It's not that bad...

A lot of my frontend code should probably live in a file called crime.js

Great collection of real video game changelog entries: https://twitter.com/thestrangelog

Then you'll love "CCutsceneMgr::RemoveEverythingFromTheWorldForTheBiggestFuckoffCutsceneEver()" - yes, that is a name originally chosen by R*!

Quirky variable names does not a good code base make.

It’s not a quirky variable name, it’s just the description of what’s happening in the game.

Rockstar forgot to strip the PlayStation binaries so I suppose those are the variable names of the original codebase.

Those are struct names though. So they wouldn't be in there. They did share some headers with the MTA developers though and that's where we got bRenderScorched from. i think the body part name is ours though.

Wow... how did mta convince rockstar to share stuff like that? For what purpose?

R* was a lot more open at the time and I guess they wanted to help them implement a multiplayer mode. that was before the whole hot coffee story.

Guess it was good market research.

Now GTA V / GTA Online made half a billion dollars in 2019, six years after it was released.

Definitely. Early GTA Online was heavily inspired by MTA game modes.

For example, the races on crazy roads floating in the sky was a hallmark of MTA. It's far too abstract to think R* came up with that idea independently of the many years of prior art in MTA.

It's a shame they only copied the game modes and not the architecture, as GTA Online's biggest downfall is the P2P networking.