laeus

Having worked in games for 13 years, at studios large and small and projects of the same variety, source code access has almost never blipped on the radar. The few times when we had issues with various engines for which we didn't have source, our support contracts gave us the changes we needed to ship on time. On occasion we modified the engine, only to be hit by tricky merges with subsequent releases. In general, I've found that modifying an engine should be done by engine programmers (and if a game company does enough engine development to have such specialists, it's probably not licensing any of these options).

The latest Unreal is a wonderful piece of engine software. Their blueprint system as well as their material editor and best-in-class renderer really are something to talk about. They also have a gigantic learning community. And I think their licensing terms are a good approach.

However, Unity has blazing fast compilation time on the order of seconds, a properly built play-in-editor mode, large asset and plugin ecosystem, seamless asset pipeline, and support for a modern programming language in C#. Each of these could arguably be considered a game changer in isolation, but in aggregate they are an efficiency avalanche. Nothing makes a better game, faster, than being able to go from idea to prototype in five minutes rather than two hours. It's possible to try more things, to discard ten or even fifty bad ideas for every good one, and still come out ahead. This is what it all comes down to, in my experience. And when you're done, you can port your game to over a dozen platforms (in some edge cases by simply changing a dropdown value).

That said, I'm happy that both engines are so good, because it means neither will rest on its laurels. Unreal's marketplace and Unity 5's renderer are no accidents.

Right, I meant "pulling their weight" in a relative sense, with the understanding that a more experienced and talented employee will do more work or do it more quickly. Maybe my desire is simply to increase the proportion of coworkers who make roughly appropriate contributions to the team effort. I once had to explain how splines worked to a graphics programmer with 20 years of industry experience.

A trial process like this would select against lots of quality developers, true, but that isn't the real question. Instead, I want to know whether the developers who wind up being hired represent a more talented subset. I can't prove that it would, but I feel that this system would be more accurate in letting the right people through.

All that said, I like some of the gray area solutions proposed in this HN thread, including after-hours or weekend remote work on a project already in production. Not a perfect solution, given the inability to evaluate things like culture fit, but it combines many upsides of the alternatives.

To be honest, having experienced the tremendous damage done by poor hires (and the amazing difficulty of getting rid of them once they're identified as such), I might see this as a pretty substantial benefit of working at a company that uses this method. Given that, I might be willing to participate in this kind of interview process. It would probably have to be a company I already know and admire for some reasons up front, but I really want to find a place to work where everybody is pulling their weight.

Absolutely right. I've gone through the dark times of wondering how to get the linker to stop exploding on me. And when speaking about developing a game engine, it's not just the work required to create feature X, it's the entire ecosystem. Making a sound play or wiring up PhysX is not difficult. Making fifty modules work correctly with each other is the foundation and is not easy or quick. Then there are editor tools, with modern engines providing a full editor suite that would take a team years to make. In the case of Unity, you get correct play-in-editor as well as truly live editing, which allow for incredibly rapid iteration (part of the true secret of efficient game development is being able to go from your shower "ah ha!" moment to a working prototype as quickly as possible). Then there's their asset store with a proliferation of not only art and sound but valuable scripts and entire systems or engines. And while I'm making my game, the middleware company is making my tech better by fixing bugs and adding features, with nearly-push-button support for over a dozen modern hardware platforms to boot.

I can see lots of reasons to develop a game engine from scratch, but they become less compelling every year.

The series is pretty good overall, but his endless tirades against OOP (many of which are specious) drained much of my enthusiasm for his blog. Regardless, it's still good reading and this new game project is a great idea.

*were

Great feedback, marred by a pointless "Iron Man reference was juvenile" comment. I for one found the example spreadsheet entertaining, and it made the product more appealing to me as a result.

I got a chance to try this out with a first-person shooter. I was not very happy with it. It felt worse than mouse+keyboard and simultaneously worse than dual-analog gamepads. Everybody in the room had issues calibrating and re-centering themselves. I'm sure it gets better with more use, but that's just the problem: it fails a fundamental usability test, because the initial experience of using it is pretty awful and requires a significant learning curve to achieve results that aren't necessarily or obviously better than either of the current standards.

This is extremely accurate based on my 11+ years of experience in the industry (across two studios). After some large AAA projects threatened people's relationships and overall happiness, many steps were taken to improve things, such as near-elimination of crunch and a high overall amount of respect for people's personal lives.

Note that I actually fit into the article's title as a 35 year old guy who doesn't plan on having kids. I will often spend a few extra hours polishing something up because I relish the end result and because it energizes me to come in to work every day. Sure, I could make "double the money for half the work" in some other industry, but I love making games and can't imagine sacrificing my passion to make some equation look better on paper. But I never pressure others to stay late, and from what I'm seeing these days, more and more studios are converting to a reasonable outlook on developer productivity and happiness.

Basically everything this guy wants is at odds with my own desires for a social network. Facebook's previously countless virality loopholes were what almost turned it into some bizarro version of MySpace, with polluted News Feeds and endless wall requests to send people coins and sheep. If G+ goes down this path, I will certainly not follow.

This "lab report" always brings back good memories because it indirectly launched my career in the game industry. I was finishing up my CS degree at UW Madison and working in Mike Gleicher's computer graphics lab in Spring '02. I had previously met Lucas through a fellow CS student (Alex Mohr, now at Pixar). At some point, Lucas was contacted by the AI programmer at Ensemble Studios (Mike Kidd). Mike, a UW alum, had seen the Germanium treatise and wanted Lucas to apply at ES. A month later, knowing how eager I was to join the game industry, Lucas mentioned Mike's email to me and forwarded him my info. Long story short, I got an interview at ES and was hired straight out of college into a dream job.

I look forward to seeing this link pop up again in a few years. :)