the cart before the chicken & the horse and the egg
i seem to have a lot of posts that follow the format “ah, i remember when… / so, nowadays…” or sometimes the other way ’round. so in that fine tradition…
ah, i remember when. working at Kesmai with a relatively small team of a few dozen folks, there were two ways of getting your pet feature (or desperately needed functionality) into the game. The Right Way – having an approved design, getting your tech docs in order, getting implementation on the schedule, and let engineering take its course. and The Ninja Way – ascertaining the programmer’s favorite scotch, procuring a bottle, and presenting said bottle in exchange for getting the work done after hours (and not while consuming the scotch…that part is key).
so, nowadays. we’ve got a pet feature that we want to get in, and we’re really psyched on it. thing is, Zenimax is a much bigger studio, working on much bigger projects, with much bigger development processes. almost everything has to be done The Right Way. it’s much harder (and more frowned upon) to do stuff The Ninja Way. loose cannons are bad for well-oiled machines, to mix my metaphors. but our pet feature is of such a nature that one almost has to see the finished version in the game to be convinced it even belongs on the feature list. that is, we have to get it done before we can get it started – the best way to build momentum for design approval is to actually show the damn thing to people. holy catch-22, batman.
hm. what’s even more stealthy than a Ninja?
