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Large Dev Teams Do Not Make For Quick Dev Cycles
Josh Bennett writes "1UP has a recent interview with Splinter Cell Chaos Theory Producer Mathieu Ferland where he talks about the difficulties in developing the game. In the article, Ferland said there are 120 people working on the game. That's not unheard of for a big budget EA game, but those games come out every year and the new Splinter Cell is taking more than two years at this point. Interesting read."
I just won't support a tyrannical company who uses their employees like a pirate ship used pirates. Go steal the treasure (Do all the work, get killed), sail the high seas (get scurvy, die), and when the treasure is buried you all get disposed of because you aren't needed anymore. EA worked them to the bone, disregarded their families, and probably gave them various mind sicknesses from lack of sleep. I hope the ex-workers in the class action lawsuit take EA for all they can.
You can't build a house in a week no matter how many men you throw on it. After a point, your returns diminish.
Have you seen that makeover show, I think it's on ABC, that has done just that? One house in particular actually had to have foundation work done on it. (I don't watch it routinely, just caught it a couple times.)
I actually don't say this to disagree with you. One of the reasons neither my wife nor I can really stand to watch that show regularly is we both know you can't build a house from the foundation in a week... but you can build a television set from the foundation in a week. We have a rather strong suspicion that as neat as these houses look on TV, and as cool as they look on the surface (eliciting the cries of joy from the new owners), that these people are really just getting television sets. And those are no fun to live in.
I don't know, I'd love to be wrong, but the suspicion that these make-over-ees are getting boned wrecks the show for us. If 20/20 or equivalent show from another network followed up on one of these homes after a year or two, and everything was peachy within reason, maybe I wouldn't feel this way. But I suspect "peachy" wouldn't be the right word.
But it sure would be an interesting experiment though.. Assuming there was already a common goal, what do you think would happen? Assuming there is some quality to the engineers, I think they'd immediately recognize the need for organization and the first problem they would solve is establishing that by some kind of engineered process. Without a formal process, I think the natural leaders would emerge as the people who spearhead the most agreeded upon initiatives, people would naturally align themselves with the projects they feel most comfortable with.
But doing that with -120- people would be pretty nuts. I've seen natural hierarchies emerge in pools of 10-15 people working on a project, but 120 would definitely be something else. A big factor that I've seen with natural leaders emerging from a pool of previous equal individuals was the leaders' initiative to acquire neccesary resources. Whoever acquired neccesary resources first is
If you ran an experiment with preacquired resources that nobody involved was responsible for acquiring, I think the natural method of acquiring a leader would become seriously muddied by politics instead of practicality. Acquiring resources is something that can be demonstrated immediately. Spending them is something you can't judge until it's too late if you are wrong.