Anson the Gnome

Clearly I haven't done a very good job of blogging lately. I'll chalk that up to putting a lot of effort into finding another project to work on.

Today, I started a new job at BioWare, as an Infrastructure Engineer. It's not a glamorous job - I'm working on the tools and systems that keep the more game-specific teams agile - but as I've said a few times, there's a lot to get right when you're making, launching, and operating a successful MMOG.

That's pretty much what I want to do right now, with Dungeon Runners about to close and my last project never seeing the light of day. I'm in this industry to make people happy, and I'm working on MMOGs in particular because they can reach such a broad audience for so long. I've had some trouble actually making that happen, but I think BioWare can do it - that's a horse I want to hitch my wagon to.

For the last year, I've been working on an unannounced strategy MMO based on an IP I can't talk about.

But, that project ended today. Maybe I'll have time to finish more blog posts now ;-)

edited for... clarity.

I'm primarily a server programmer, but I still end up doing UI work every once in a while, and that's been true for the majority of the last three weeks. Not being an experienced old hand at UI design, I find myself falling back on first principles and decade-old books. I'm mostly happy with the results, but the code that results in implementing the interface... well, it's not the kind of code that I like to write.

One of the basic principles of interface design¹ is coherence:

Internal consistency means that the program's behaviors make "sense" with respect to other parts of the program.... One should strive towards the principle of "least surprise".

If one part of your interface shows that your sword gives you a skill bonus, everything that displays information on skills should incorporate that bonus.

Put another way, each individual part of the user interface that displays information will grow to depend on both the information it ostensibly displays, plus what every other part of the interface ever displays. Very little code is left loosely coupled to the interface: data hiding obstructs coherence, singletons and global variables spring up, even the code that takes actions based on user input gets more context-sensitive (making it hard to avoid keeping that code loosely coupled and non-repetitive), and so on.

Is this bad? Nah, not really. It's just one of the many pressures that (in the short term) pushes against loose coupling, DRY code, and good code architecture. A good UI is an important aspect of good software, including games. But sometimes... sometimes, the things I do to the code in the name of users just seems awful. :-)

EDIT: Edited for clarity based on early feedback.

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1. Per A Summary of User Interface Design Principles. See? All my references are a decade old...

Scott already has the best picture of the vulture stalking us. We've seen him outside the office a couple of times, but this time it seemed like he really wanted us to know he was there.

Joe Ludwig has been talking about continuous deployment recently. The basic goals of continuous deployment are two-fold: minimize downtime, and minimize the time between writing code and finding out it's wrong (it could be wrong for a lot of reasons, not just bugs).

An interesting counterpoint came from Ben Ziegler a couple of weeks later (I'm just following the trend in writing my take on the subject a couple more weeks on), arguing that downtime - and bugs, and lag - just don't matter.

First, let me point out that this isn't a new discussion, by any means. As of this writing, Bug Free Doesn't Sell is a wiki article last edited almost three years ago... on this exact subject¹.

On the one hand, I think Ben is right: "Stable, fast, fun. In that order" is not a mantra for a great game. "Fun. probably stable, and fast enough" is a better mantra. It's hard to see the direct benefit to maximizing stability and minimizing downtime, and it's always possible to over-think technical challenges and lose focus on the game itself in solving them.

On the other hand, I think there are a lot of indirect benefits. Doing things right attracts people who are interested in solving new problems (or old problems better), it reduces operational overhead (manual steps and emergency downtime require hands on deck - costs I'm probably more aware of, having worked down the hall from NCsoft operational staff), and it's another defense against the motivation-sapping attitude "nothing works right around here."

Hell, to some extent, you don't even have to succeed at minimizing downtime to see the benefits (c.f. Blizzard's launch of World of Warcraft). Mistakes were made, but they came more from inexperience in MMOGs specifically than bad culture, lack of investment, or having bad programmers. Now, though, that doesn't really apply; we have to create technical failures in other ways. We know better than to make the same mistakes, we'll recognize the same old mistakes coming... and if we do nothing but let them wash over us, we'll see our motivation and investment in the game disappear.

And then the game will suck, and people will argue about whether the problems were technical or not.

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1. Incidentally, any programmers who aren't familiar with the Portland Pattern Repository's Wiki - it might be the oldest web-based programmer community around, and is the original Wiki. It can be hard to read at times, but there is a ton of stuff and it's easy to get lost in there for hours.