Doesn’t hurt that they are developing games - something every programmer secretly wishes he was…

I actually believed that these were just bedtime stories, but it seems that Noel

Agile development is not very common in the games industry… yet. Give it a few more years and you’ll be seeing many more companies adopt it (OK, so that’s just my prediction).

You might want to read what I wrote a while ago about advice for people looking to get in the games industry: http://www.gamesfromwithin.com/articles/0501/000066.html

In the meanwhile, the best thing you can do is to write games and mods of your own. Good luck!

That entry makes your company/life sound so fun! Is every day like that? How hard is it to find a company like that? I’m only young atm, not old enough to get a job yet – but when I can – thats exactly the kind of place I want to work in (agile development, etc).

Any tips?

Noel Llopis has a fascinating article about using Extreme Programming at a game company. I found it interesting because it’s not only an example of picture-perfect XP, it’s also about a team that’s doing game development, not something you see every day.

ConstructorInitialization “Constructor Initialization is my first choice. There are cases when it’s difficult to set things up this way and I do occasionally prefer setter initialization, but most of the time constructor initialization is the best bet…

Also initially did you get problems where some people (the know it alls or senior experianced guys) needed to be in paired with most of the task creating bottlenecks?

Doesn’t hurt that they are developing games - something every programmer secretly wishes he was…

- Testing OpenGL is tricky. You want to test your code is doing the right thing (not that OpenGL is doing the right thing–you hope it is!). So you can just test that you’re calling a function you wrote that sets a set of render states and that function is untested. You can also write a wrapper around OpenGL and test that the functions are called, but that’s probably more work than it’s worth unless you’re doing a middleware renderer. Testing the pixels is more of a functional test (which also has a place, but not as part of fast unit tests).

- Working with a designer. Check out Clint’s web site and presentations. That’s exactly what he talks about in detail and can explain it a lot better than I can here. But briefly, you’re working with a small team of programmers/designers/artists towards a small set of goals for an iteration (2 weeks). The goals (stories) well defined (but not micromanaged). For example, fully implement the boss in level 3 to shippable quality, or implement grapple moves in the fighting system. With that, you break them down into tasks (things you need to do that take anywhere between 1 and 8 hours) and everybody in your team works on them.

My work with designers/artists has been much more iterative than you descrive. We talk about what we need, and they give us a rough version in an hour or two. We bring it in the game (or see that are some problems and need to be changed). Now we can work with those assets and they can see it in the game. They might continue adding assets incrementally and working with programmers to try different things, discuss performance/memory implications, etc. But certainly, nobody dissapears for 1-5 days and comes back later with assets. Maybe you can do that once you’re in full production and the pipeline/technology is well known though.

Also, check out the Agile Game Developmen group (http://groups.google.com/group/Agile-Game-Development). Perfect place to bring up questions like that.

Could you elaborate? I’m not sure how the artist siting next to me and the artist sitting behind me are not “in my team”. On features we need to work on together we work on them together but for the most part we, the programmers, are providing “smart items?” that the designers and artists can use to build the “game”. Those items though or often thought up by the designers at the momment, not planned days or weeks in advance.

For more complicated items like a particular creature there is some discussion about what it should do, then a paper sketch of the assets needs (meshes, motions, hot spots, whatever). Then the artist goes off on her own for 1-5 days making those assets. When they are done or at least usable the programmer, by himself, will use them to get the creature working. Once it’s working they may sit together and tweak it.

Maybe your definition of “feature” would help?

How can you write a test which fails with the old code and passes with the new? Have the test code run glReadPixels and compare pixels? Or is there some better way?

I just stumbled across Games from Within, Noel Llopis’s blog on agile technologies and processes applied to game development.