Here’s a postmortem of a game development that was “nearly ready (with the devs in crunch mode) for over a year. “During the development of StarCraft, a two and a half year slog with over a year of crunch time prior to launch, the game was as buggy as a termite nest. StarCraft crashed frequently enough that play-testing was difficult right up until release, and the game continued to require ongoing patching efforts post-launch.”
@Steve_S gives ten reasons:
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Junior programmers given no guidance.
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Project leads had no proven experience writing this sort of app from scratch.
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Development was full-out sprint without code reviews, unit tests or training.
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Used new language nobody on team had experience in, and without discipline.
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Changed their mind in the middle of development, radically changing features and appearance.
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Rewrote core components instead of upgrading them.
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Wildly underestimated completion date: remained at T minus 2 months for 14 months.
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Heavy, punishing work hours that left programmers exhausted.
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Used container class with logic externalized to callers.
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Serialization an afterthought; lots of absolute pointers instead of indexes.
I would love to be able to say that these terrible mistakes are rare in the industry or unique to gaming. I would love to, really…
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via @Sakari_Maaranen
Originally shared by spencer portée (exussum)