Developers, what are some of the craziest things you seen or heard about?

Ohh god I'm going to have nightmares now...

 

Sorry Graham, I had to say it!

 

I suppose that's not the type of personal information that is casually bandied about in game programmer's conversations. The only developer that I've ever heard of who's orientation was obvious (at least I think it was) was the dude(tte) who wrote M.U.L.E. (RIP Dani Bunten, that was a great game.)

 

for what it's worth, at one distant e3 my coworker and i had to carry some talks with a publisher under the background accompaniment of some rather distracting sounds coming from a nearby cubicle room on the same showfloor.. but i guess it had more to do with publisher and boothbabes, than with programmers.

 

Just so long as you don't change the name in the comments and claim that those names are simply an alias you use so that nobody thinks you're wasting your time.

Not in so many words, no, but it's pretty common for male game programmers to become slack-jawed drooling lollygaggers at the sight of attractive women to say nothing of losing all mental faculties when receiving a Victoria's Secret catalog in the mail. And in that sense, our orientations become quite obvious.

 

This is getting awkward.

 

I nominate this for thread of the year

 

Well I program, and I'm fine with women. Then again, I don't have a girlfriend either. However, that's only because I haven't bothered to get one. I mean, I'm not gay or anything, I just don't care that much. I guess this song explains it best. heh.

 

I can tell you there's no need for cubicles either (when it's an open office).
Granted, when you work in a place that spends more time throwing parties then actually working, funny things are bound to happen.

Heh, reminds me of my first university year. Comp.Sci program had like 300 guys and 4 girls in 1st year. And out of those I think only 1 was actually serious about studying there.

 

Ain't that the truth! Computing just doesn't appeal to girls, it seems.

Kinda back on topic, this is a story of bitter irony, from an unfortunate friend of mine, which I heard throughout it's long development. I've missed a lot of the inbetween misery because I can't remember the specifics, but it's the ending that makes this story.

He works for a software company that I'll call DuffSoft which handles critical data in a potentially life-threatening application if it's wrong. DuffSoft started back in the early days of DOS with a single guy developing the app, then growing with a few colleagues, and was very successful. The guy that created the program really researched his stuff, did performance analysis to find the fastest way to solve problems, etc. It was a Good Product. At that point it could have been called GreatSoft. The company grew, things got complicated of course, and he sold it and retired (medical issues stress related, unsurprisingly). At this point the product was using DOS file formats, massive flat-files, and a Windows front-end.

A government initiative needed lots of these systems and approached the private sector for solutions. A company that I'll call GodHelpUs.com and another called Morsens-Thanthat won the contract, neither having any experience or knowledge of this field. In fact one isn't even an IT company. Great. They were considering DuffSoft to supply their app, but needed upgrades. Lots of upgrades. A switch from mammoth flat-files to SQL databases for one. A Web interface for another. They had about 2 years to accomplish this.

DuffSoft starts taking on lots of staff. The turnaround is terrible, by the way, as the management is atrocious, but that's by the by. Basically the execs are after a quick buck and are constantly changing strategy, resulting in not one new product being created in years and the company still surviving on the efforts of the guy that started it.

A middle-manager is brought in (the third for this position after two failures) to try and get the development team to make the upgrades. He can be summed up as a liar. He then wrote a document describing all the things DuffSoft's software could do and approached GodHelpUs.com. They were impressed and gave DuffSoft the contract. Morsens-Thanthat copied what GodHelpUs.com did because they didn't know what they were doing and thought GHU.com did (in case you were wondering, Morsens-Thanthat is the IT company and they followed that one that isn't.). I can't go into the specifics of this guy's management methods, but as a liar he said everything was rosy, didn't appreciate the time or difficulty needed to implement new features, yada yada, same old same old. These managers seem to come from the same inept gene-pool.

A couple of years later, the software was nowhere near being upgraded. GHU.com was making demands, the manger was lying saying everything was on track. Morsens-Thanthat finally realised DuffSoft weren't going to come up with the goods and changed supplier, losing DuffSoft millions in contract sales.

An employee, bemused how DuffSoft ever won the contract when their product was so far from being what was needed, got a hold of a copy of the presentation the manager gave to GHU.com and it was a fantastic work of fiction. Yep, he claimed features were working that currently they had no idea how to implement, let alone not have working effectively (the dev team had suggested excellent solutions, all turned down of course as mangers only accept their own ideas). On paper DuffSoft's product looked great, but it was all salesmanship and no truth.

So far, all very typical. Nothing special. 18 months later DuffSoft had 6 months remaining to write the software that they had made no progress on. Than the manager announced he was leaving the company. The development team were ecstatic as they might get a new manager who would actually direct them toward progress without constantly changing tack, maybe even listyen to suggestions (the Holy Grail of the workforce), but they did politely attended the leaving do down the pub, probably because beer was involved, and certainly not for any love of the manager. And then the manager announced he had a new position. He was moving to GodHelpUs.com and would be heading their government contract work. He would be liaising with DuffSoft about the product DuffSoft was supplying. That's right! Knowing that DuffSoft's software was, as a result of his mis-leadership, a pile of worthless poo, he was now heading the company holding his own fictional spec docs on DuffSoft's product that he used to win the contract and using that as reference to what the product should be doing! He could ring up DuffSoft and expect to see these features running as the specs doc claimed, knowing it was nothing like the truth.

Thankfully, GHU.com had no idea what they were doing, missed all their own deadlines, weren't in a position to make demands of DuffSoft because they weren't achieving anything anyway, and it was another crappy government initiative instigated by people who know absolutely nothing about the field of work their heading and executed by lowest-price selected private sector companies who knew even less (despite that theoretically not being possible ) who commissioned products based on fantasy marketing docs with no understanding of the real product.

Reassuringly par for the course, I think.

 

That is seriously messed up.

 

'typically messed up' would be a better term.

 

A head programmer for a (non-games) company I once interned at strictly adhered to the rule of "One Aspirin a day keeps heart-attack at bay"...

 

That seems to be a bit more common than you think. Ever since the AMA got into the whole aspirin therapy for heart attack patients (since it is an anti-inflammatory), various people just started doing it expecting their lives would be saved.

I did a freelance job for a guy who went by the same philosophy and whenever he asked for progress reports, he'd also ask if I was taking my aspirin every day (which of course, I wasn't, but said I was so he'd shut up about it). When I finally sent out a deliverable, he was apparently happy with it, so he handed me my check and then shot himself. You can probably guess the check bounced.

In any case, after having worked for the creature, a story like that gets lost in the shuffle.

 

:O


...


Wow.

 

Yea, reminds me of some stuff from my - before game-industry days. We were developing software for real-estate management/agencies and our main client was right up there with "the creature" mentioned earlier in the thread.
The guy's company had a consistent track record of either borrowing money and never paying it back or signing large contracts they had no intention of ever fullfilling (at least if it involved them paying for anything). Unfortunately we weren't aware of that at the time of being contracted for the said product.
After a long gruelling period of idiotic non-stop spec changes (the fun of working with customers that pretend to know everything but have absolutely NO idea what they actually want) the product was finally delivered in near final state and when first payments were due, instead of paying anything, the guy sent our office a bill of his own, allegedely for his "consultation services". There were also unsubstantiated demands for IP ownership over things that were of course never agreed upon in the contract.
The sum he demanded also slightly exceeded the entire sum he was supposed to pay US for the product according to the initial contract, and he was threatening with going to court etc.

Of course, he also happened to have the best lawyer in the country working for him - which he needed, considering he spent most of his time in court getting sued by or suing his bussiness partners.
About a month later I heard he attempted to sue the national newspaper over the money He owed them...

 

Hmmm... deja vu...
With the creature, it was each and every new episode of Star Trek it had watched, and it would come in the next day saying "I just saw this episode of Star Trek the other day, and ... etc. etc... and I'm going to make that priority number one for you guys -- just make sure you also give it that chrome color. Oh, and I'll bring in the tape tomorrow so you guys can see what I want from you."

The sheer number of times the game kept changing the game design flippantly as if there was nothing to it was largely due to its attitude towards skilled labor (which I won't list any quotes about as they're a little too infuriating).

The fact that it went from the holodeck thing, to a futuristic racing game, to a futuristic racing game in which you fight a "neural network" at the end, to a game about fighting a race of robots belonging to a "hive mine", to a neural network that wanted to join with the "ultimate human" so it could learn how to laugh, to a race of aliens defeated by the Nazis who stole their technology to win WWII... yeesh.

Some of the best moments include telling us that if we overanalyze it, we might as well have the neural net combine with a philosopher... (HUH?!??). And it was shortly after that moment that the creature got served with a summons about an old lady suing its construction company over a faulty wheelchair ramp.

 

Whoah that guy took Wolfestenin3D, Matrix, Tron, Start Trek, Wipeout etc and mixed them in a blender?

 

I've recently found a nice "guide" for this sort of thing, I think it was in a presentation about Shadow of the Colossus held at GDC. It was something along the lines "I only start implementing a feature after the designer has asked for it on three separate occasions."

If only I had thought of that on my own / earlier...

 

Wrong. If you print things out without being forced to do so, you can't be a programmer.