Colossal Cave Adventure remake from Ken & Roberta Williams

[Tweed]

Cool.

 

[Grauken]

It's a huge invasion of privacy, but if we were in an office and they were in a cubicle I'd be able to wander by and see their screens anytime I wanted.

What a clueless boomer

 

[taxalot]

 

[Blackthorne]

He never did that with me, I can tell you that.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

I don't know why he'd need that monitoring software when all he'd have to do is check the subversion/git logs for commits. This is how we worked when I was in the industry.

New art, gets committed, you can see the change.
Programmer modifies the code, gets committed, you can see their update.
QA Runs through and files a report, their run through reports get committed to git, you can see what they did. The Jira/Bugzilla/what ever bugtracker you're using shows the bug reports and timestamps.
If a game designer is involved their GDD's are committed to the git as well.

All the manager has to do is set a deliverables time-frame, normally its COB. The studio heads never bothered to check any of the data (because they suck).

Hubstaff seems extremely overkill for a game like this.

 

[Rincewind]

Who cares if you work 8 hours straight, or spend 2-3 hours thinking, 1 coding, and the rest going for a walk and just generally messing around. The end result is what matters; creative jobs such as coding are not like digging holes or painting fences at an hourly rate.

In my case, I can get good results using the second method, and would burn out pretty quickly by doing the first (and that's why I don't work like that...)

You can pretty much sit in an office 40 hours a week and not achieve that much. Or spend 2-3 hours a day 100% focused to get a lot more done.

 

[Rincewind]

Remember to work 8 hours straight but if you play a video game you need to take a break every hour minutes.

You need to take breaks in both cases at 1-2 hour intervals

 

[Pyke]

My advice for anyone working with outsourced workers - don't EVER do an hourly agreement.

Pay per outcome with a set deadline. You need 10 textured assets within a style guide at no more than 5000 polygons. The deadline is 10 working days.

This goes for freelancers as well. Don't charge per hour. Charge for outcomes.

Charging per hour just penalises you for being more efficient.
Paying per hour just rewards inefficiency.

This also lets you monitor your budget with WAY more accuracy. There are no surprises, because it's all been agreed to beforehand.

Hell - even when I ran a large studio with employees YEARS ago - any work done as overtime was done like this. It works out better for everyone.

 

[Grauken]

My advice for anyone working with outsourced workers - don't EVER do an hourly agreement.

Pay per outcome with a set deadline. You need 10 textured assets within a style guide at no more than 5000 polygons. The deadline is 10 working days.

This goes for freelancers as well. Don't charge per hour. Charge for outcomes.

Charging per hour just penalises you for being more efficient.
Paying per hour just rewards inefficiency.

This also lets you monitor your budget with WAY more accuracy. There are no surprises, because it's all been agreed to beforehand.

Hell - even when I ran a large studio with employees YEARS ago - any work done as overtime was done like this. It works out better for everyone.

That's why I said Ken Williams has a boomer mindset. Some of the people I know who are in the office all day long and always "busy" are some of the most useless people as well

 

[Maxie]

he's not interested in shipping a product inasmuch as he is in breathing down your neck ("slacking off? get a broom then hnah!"), I suspect he doesn't even like video games that much

 

[Rincewind]

My advice for anyone working with outsourced workers - don't EVER do an hourly agreement.

Pay per outcome with a set deadline. You need 10 textured assets within a style guide at no more than 5000 polygons. The deadline is 10 working days.

This goes for freelancers as well. Don't charge per hour. Charge for outcomes.

Charging per hour just penalises you for being more efficient.
Paying per hour just rewards inefficiency.

This also lets you monitor your budget with WAY more accuracy. There are no surprises, because it's all been agreed to beforehand.

Hell - even when I ran a large studio with employees YEARS ago - any work done as overtime was done like this. It works out better for everyone.

Agree with everything, except your last sentence — forcing people to do overtime. That's just a sign of bad management and planning. With salaried employees working a fixed amount of hours per week it's more about planning carefully to meet deadlines, etc.

One good incentive for *management* is to have them pay at least double rates for overtime — it goes both ways.

 

[Pyke]

I've personally never forced overtime. Any OT we ever did was prearranged and paid at time and a half, or double time. But it was always agreed to before. I know that we are/were in the minority of employers who did this tho. :D

 

[Infinitron]

Kilg0re Trout from GOGcom team just did an interview with Ken and Roberta on Twitch:

 

[Norfleet]

Remember to work 8 hours straight but if you play a video game you need to take a break every hour for 15 minutes.

That's just the load screens.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Yeah the gamegrumps video totally debunks Ken's claim about people not liking Roberta. The comments are gushing over her.
I'm wondering is that going to translate into sales though.

 

[AndyS]

Yeah the gamegrumps video totally debunks Ken's claim about people not liking Roberta. The comments are gushing over her.
I'm wondering is that going to translate into sales though.

With Roberta, any negativity out there has less to do with her sex (especially since adventure games are a genre with a relatively large female audience) and more to do with a lot of Ron Gilbert/Lucasarts acolytes pushing the idea over the last 20+ years that she was never a good designer in the first place because Sierra's games required you to save a lot because of dying and walking dead scenarios.

 

[Jarpie]

My advice for anyone working with outsourced workers - don't EVER do an hourly agreement.

Pay per outcome with a set deadline. You need 10 textured assets within a style guide at no more than 5000 polygons. The deadline is 10 working days.

This goes for freelancers as well. Don't charge per hour. Charge for outcomes.

Charging per hour just penalises you for being more efficient.
Paying per hour just rewards inefficiency.

This also lets you monitor your budget with WAY more accuracy. There are no surprises, because it's all been agreed to beforehand.

Hell - even when I ran a large studio with employees YEARS ago - any work done as overtime was done like this. It works out better for everyone.

That's why I said Ken Williams has a boomer mindset. Some of the people I know who are in the office all day long and always "busy" are some of the most useless people as well

Office Space is modern classic.

 

[Pyke]

I've been working for myself since I was 20 - but I had ONE job before that when I was 19 for a year... and that "you'll only work just hard enough to not get fired" line is SO true.
I put more effort into our inter office chess league than I did into my actual work.

 

[Naraya]

I've been working for myself since I was 20 - but I had ONE job before that when I was 19 for a year... and that "you'll only work just hard enough to not get fired" line is SO true.
I put more effort into our inter office chess league than I did into my actual work.

This line might be SO true when you work for some kind of a big corporation that doesn't know how many "resources" it has (or ANY state-owned/government institution). But try it in a startup-ish company and you would learn that your limits are much higher than you thought, and very quickly. Been there, done that.

 

[Dexter]

I've been reading Ken's book recently: https://kensbook.com/

And there's a brief Chapter about how he ranks employees that would probably lead to conniption fits among some people:

Spoiler

There was also a bit about how he chose designers that I believe our current video game commentators would probably point out also had something else in common:

And finally further into the book there was a bit along with his trouble with "unions" about how he was somewhat of a "slave driver" and overworked people and had them do crunch to get products ready for the Christmas sales period and how he has no excuse for it and might have done things differently, but ultimately concluding he had to do what he had to do to keep the company solvent after it almost went bankrupt once and that he was probably right because of how SIERRA as a company ended up after he was gone:

 

[Grauken]

I've been reading Ken's book recently: https://kensbook.com/

And there's a brief Chapter about how he ranks employees that would probably lead to conniption fits among some people:

Spoiler

There was also a bit about how he chose designers that I believe our current video game commentators would probably point out also had something else in common:

And finally further into the book there was a bit along with his trouble with "unions" about how he was somewhat of a "slave driver" and overworked people and had them do crunch to get products ready for the Christmas sales period and how he has no excuse for it and might have done things differently, but ultimately concluding he had to do what he had to do to keep the company solvent after it almost went bankrupt once and that he was probably right because of how SIERRA as a company ended up after he was gone:

Guy is literally this meme

 

[Rincewind]

As I see it, according to his ranking, people who are better than B players are the stupid ones. Being an A or AAA player is basically pathological behaviour that would lead to burnout and health issues, and more importantly, why would you do that for *any* company where you aren't the owner? It's overachieving at the detriment of everything else for... what exactly? A pat on the back? You'll get the same salary at the month's end.

If it's about 4 guys working on a game where profit is shared *equally*, it's an altogether different thing; you're doing it for yourself. "Being available at night and weekend" as a salaried employee out of the kindness of your heart, that's insanity.

Unions must exist exactly to prevent people like him from exploiting his employees for *his* own profit, at *their* expense.

I'm disappointed, Ken.

 

[Dexter]

Unions must exist exactly to prevent people like him from exploiting his employees for *his* own profit, at *their* expense.

How he dealt with the unions:

 

[Rincewind]

If management was fair towards their employees, they would not have even considered forming an union, right? That's the TL;DR.

Also, that's a *single* perspective. It would be interesting to read the personal accounts of the overworked employees too. At the end of the day, they're not the ones spending decades yachting around the world...

Also, I find this all a bit retarded... I worked at places before where sometimes 10-12 hours was required for a month or so. But the deal was that: you do that, then you get a bonus which amounts to about 3 months' worth of salary *on top* of your normal salary for that month. That was a fair deal; the company had a much greater profit as a result of that time-critical work. I and others were happy to do it, and we got our bonuses. If they tried to force us for zero compensation, well, fuck off...

 

[Pyke]

I've been working for myself since I was 20 - but I had ONE job before that when I was 19 for a year... and that "you'll only work just hard enough to not get fired" line is SO true.
I put more effort into our inter office chess league than I did into my actual work.

This line might be SO true when you work for some kind of a big corporation that doesn't know how many "resources" it has (or ANY state-owned/government institution). But try it in a startup-ish company and you would learn that your limits are much higher than you thought, and very quickly. Been there, done that.

The company that I worked for was only 15 people. It's not that work gets done, and then you sit there for 6 hours - it's that a task that takes 1 hour gets stretched out to 4 hours. You're still 'working' - but you're not working effeciently - because it doesnt matter if you get it done in 1 hour or 4.

But when I started working for myself my workload went up exponentially because suddenly TIME became a limited resource. That's why - generally - a person working in an OUTPUT based work environment will generally be much more effiecient.