I'm wondering if anyone on this board has worked for a developer that churned out shovelware. For example, Data Design has consistently pumped out crap such as Anubis II, Ninjabread Man, and a number of Europe-only turds. So I was wondering if anyone here has ever worked for such a company and could clue us in on what goes on behind the scenes there. What's the process that leads to such horrible game ideas? What goes on in development so that the graphics and controls are so fundamentally broken? How do people have the self-respect to do it multiple times?
Did You Ever Work on Shovelware?
- Thread starter fearsomepirate
- Start date
Because they like making a living and being able to pay their bills?
There's no neccessary correlation between the ability to gather resources for a project and the ability to properly execute plans, particularly ambitious ones.
My first job was at a company that has managed to secure serious funding, but their capability has ended there, and the studio was filled with people who didn't know anything but how to kiss ass. Thus the money flew out of the window and the company collapsed. I've been too naive to believe up to the end that it could still be salvaged and it has set me back a few years in some ways - but I've learned a LOT and found a few very good friends.
My first job was at a company that has managed to secure serious funding, but their capability has ended there, and the studio was filled with people who didn't know anything but how to kiss ass. Thus the money flew out of the window and the company collapsed. I've been too naive to believe up to the end that it could still be salvaged and it has set me back a few years in some ways - but I've learned a LOT and found a few very good friends.
Yeah, but I'd assume they would say, "Hey, let's make a living and give a damn at the same time." I understand that not all games have the production values of Metal Gear Solid. But come on, how can Data Design churn out turd after turd without even seeming to care what the result is like? That's why I want the inside scoop.
Laa-Yosh's answer makes sense.
Most of these houses hire inexperienced people, as a new college graduate you're going to have to be damn lucky to get a job working on a AAA title.
Not everyone is in the industry for the "creative side", to a lot of people these days it's just a job.
Besides who knows maybe they treat their employees extremely well.
Not everyone is in the industry for the "creative side", to a lot of people these days it's just a job.
Besides who knows maybe they treat their employees extremely well.
If by "work" you mean "play shovelware games that FELT like work..." 
Software development projects, especially as complicated as modern games, are extremely difficult things to manage and succeed in. Opposite to what most gamers and critics think, it does not take "evil, corrupt managers" and "lazy-ass coders" to produce a turd. It takes a really cracking A-team and a great deal of good fortune along the way to produce a remotely decent game.
I don't think anyone will name names for bad projects, because at the end of the day your intention is always to make something great, it's just things never go to plan. The quality of the product represents how well you can cope with changes in plans.
My (albeit limited) experience would suggest there are two main causes, which I group very broadly:
a) conflict of opinion / arrogance / lack of clear vision / lack of fixed goals to use in decisions (target audience etc)
b) lack of proper planning / ability to accurately predict timeframes / and the effects this has on finances / 'firefighter*'
If a game has a bad control scheme, it will probably fall into group A. This can very easily be argued by:
'It worked for game X, so keep it'
'The user testers are not the experts, we are, so keep it'
'We are used to it, so it doesn't need testing'
'But we also need this ... target market game to be intuitive for ... target market'
'I'm paying this bills, it works in my mind, you must of implemented it wrong, keep it'
etc.
In any of these cases it can be *really* hard to effect a change, especially as 'the game crashes!' might be higher priority. These things can be left to QA, which may well be a bug hunt and have no time to work important things out. At the end of the day it's money, and things can no doubt be especially difficult when dealing with a client who is paying the bills and has final say. Never underestimate the ability of a client to micromanage you! (disclaimer **this has no reference to my current project**)
All sorts of things fall into B though. You can be in the most organised company in the world, but if your client can't plan, you can get into all sorts of trouble. The *worst* thing for productivity and planning is if even one single person cannot accurately predict or manage their workload - and especially if they don't learn from it. Putting something off when it's already late because there are more important (but on schedule) matters can cause all sorts of hell for those relying on the less important late task - something which can mean an order of magnitude productivity gets lost.
At work pretty much everyone has been in one of these situations before. As a company we are really well organised but it doesn't take much from a client to completely mess things up - something thankfully we won't have to deal with much longer.
That said most of us have come from jobs where it's simply a struggle to keep focused, let alone get work done.
I hope this explains why my tollerance for the 'lazy coder' insult is pretty much zero. I do really love the term shovelware though, it's just so... accurate.
*firefighter is what one of my work mate calls this. You wait until a problem is worse/more important than all others before you deal with it. This can be very productive in short bursts, but as an overall method it's an utter disaster.
My (albeit limited) experience would suggest there are two main causes, which I group very broadly:
a) conflict of opinion / arrogance / lack of clear vision / lack of fixed goals to use in decisions (target audience etc)
b) lack of proper planning / ability to accurately predict timeframes / and the effects this has on finances / 'firefighter*'
If a game has a bad control scheme, it will probably fall into group A. This can very easily be argued by:
'It worked for game X, so keep it'
'The user testers are not the experts, we are, so keep it'
'We are used to it, so it doesn't need testing'
'But we also need this ... target market game to be intuitive for ... target market'
'I'm paying this bills, it works in my mind, you must of implemented it wrong, keep it'
etc.
In any of these cases it can be *really* hard to effect a change, especially as 'the game crashes!' might be higher priority. These things can be left to QA, which may well be a bug hunt and have no time to work important things out. At the end of the day it's money, and things can no doubt be especially difficult when dealing with a client who is paying the bills and has final say. Never underestimate the ability of a client to micromanage you!
(disclaimer **this has no reference to my current project**)All sorts of things fall into B though. You can be in the most organised company in the world, but if your client can't plan, you can get into all sorts of trouble. The *worst* thing for productivity and planning is if even one single person cannot accurately predict or manage their workload - and especially if they don't learn from it. Putting something off when it's already late because there are more important (but on schedule) matters can cause all sorts of hell for those relying on the less important late task - something which can mean an order of magnitude productivity gets lost.
At work pretty much everyone has been in one of these situations before. As a company we are really well organised but it doesn't take much from a client to completely mess things up - something thankfully we won't have to deal with much longer.
That said most of us have come from jobs where it's simply a struggle to keep focused, let alone get work done.
I hope this explains why my tollerance for the 'lazy coder' insult is pretty much zero. I do really love the term shovelware though, it's just so... accurate.
*firefighter is what one of my work mate calls this. You wait until a problem is worse/more important than all others before you deal with it. This can be very productive in short bursts, but as an overall method it's an utter disaster.
Well, that explains games that seem like they could have been decent, but just didn't turn out that great. But you can look at Chicken Shoot or any of Data Design Interactive's games and see that there's more going on than a conflict of personalities in the office, a lack of quality testing, or an unforgiving schedule (i.e. the EA yearly update titles). And given the huge number of "okay" games released every year, it must not be that hard to exceed the quality of Ninjabread Man or Mini Desktop Racing.
I've occasionally wondered this myself.
It's not always about the production aspect of it.. I understand the idea of "Concept vs Reality", and saving money by hiring an inexperienced staff, etc.
The question I ask is on the financing side... How do these companies even recoup the losses? Does the game even sell well enough for them to break even, when you factor in ALL of the associated costs of developing a title? And since they probably don't break even, how do they continue to make game after game? Even the rare gems from small development houses usually end up being niche titles, played only by a small group of hardcore gamers or genre fans. I especially don't see how they can continue like that indefinitely... eventually, people are going to stop buying them altogether.
Basically, it's not the skill or mindset that I question in regards to crap titles.. but rather, the continued funding.
It's not always about the production aspect of it.. I understand the idea of "Concept vs Reality", and saving money by hiring an inexperienced staff, etc.
The question I ask is on the financing side... How do these companies even recoup the losses? Does the game even sell well enough for them to break even, when you factor in ALL of the associated costs of developing a title? And since they probably don't break even, how do they continue to make game after game? Even the rare gems from small development houses usually end up being niche titles, played only by a small group of hardcore gamers or genre fans. I especially don't see how they can continue like that indefinitely... eventually, people are going to stop buying them altogether.
Basically, it's not the skill or mindset that I question in regards to crap titles.. but rather, the continued funding.
If they make game after game.
You can pretty much assume they're making money.
A friend of mine runs a publishing company that buy's titles others have passed on, generally they are 90% done (or better still complete) when they're bought, and they give the developer a very favorable deal. But before they buy they have guarantees from retailers for enough to cover their costs and make a small amount of money.
If your costs are low, you don't have to sell a million copies to make a profit, it's just not the same AAA market the big boys are after.
You can pretty much assume they're making money.
A friend of mine runs a publishing company that buy's titles others have passed on, generally they are 90% done (or better still complete) when they're bought, and they give the developer a very favorable deal. But before they buy they have guarantees from retailers for enough to cover their costs and make a small amount of money.
If your costs are low, you don't have to sell a million copies to make a profit, it's just not the same AAA market the big boys are after.
I believe you just described government.
.Hey i Just saw my governement giving a lot of (public) money to people that any industry serious professionnal already knows they'll make shovelware (because it is already in fact.And it's a middleware do it all solution)Far Cry: Vengence + Ubisoft = Shovelware. All the shovelware in the world now has a home on the Nintendo Wii. I don't know whether to love Nintendo for being bold and unique of hate them for allowing such crap to pass as games on their system.
ShootMyMonkey
Veteran
Well, in the case of The Creature, it's not so much that the intention was to ship an utter piece of crap, but that The Creature had an image in its mind that it believed was the indisputably supreme pinnacle of gaming which was in fact a totally incoherent jumble of nonsense. At the very least, though, we did drive it away from its original vision, though the crap still kept on leaking into the pile.
You could say it positively in the form of "not *really* intending to ship crap, but having a poor idea of what was and wasn't crap.", or you could describe it more realistically in the form of "intending to ship a crappy mess of incoherent non-thoughts under the massive delusion that the only reason that others might call it crap is because their levels of thought are too low to comprehend perfection."
In the case of The Creature, it was mainly all of a, and you could place all the blame for that on the creature. Some of "b" existed, but it wasn't so much "direct" in nature. There would be some decent planning for everything, but the instability of the goals as laid out by The Creature would often end up meaning that all the planning was for naught as it would all just be raked out the next time it brought a tape of Star Trek or asked us "You know that one scene on the Borg Ship?". There was a little bit of the "firefighter" thing as you describe it, but that was more like a side-effect of the "do some cheap-ass thing right now to get the swine off your back, and then work on it seriously when it backs off", and while we had a sort of system to keep the mental void bouncing around so that no one had to deal with The Creature consecutively that often, it sometimes meant that the pile of "quick half-assed jobs" would pile up and then the serious work kept getting pushed back until that which was underdeveloped about it ultimately created a larger-than-hoped problem.
At TRI, if a game ever had issues, it was usually less of "a" and more of "b." The thing is that it is sometimes the fault of the studio management, but even more often the fault of the external management from the third-party publishers. There were a lot of cases on the side of the studio where they're so desperate that they just make decisions based on "we'll work around the problem for now, and future consequences be damned." At the face of it, many of these decisions look dumb, but it would be hard to say that in the same circumstances that one could have handled it all too differently. Then there are the things where publishers will do things or make certain decisions really really late (and the studio directors would just go along with it because they were just too much in fear) or even making dumb oversights and telling us to deal with it (e.g. sending us devkits with no docs or tools or devnet access) or just severely piss-poor communication ("Oh, didn't we tell you? This was supposed to be on PS3, not PSP!")
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