Gerry Heidenreich

Code Room - [episode 2] was just released.  The 1st episode was good... really good if you consider the production quality against the target audience (pretty awesome considering it's appeal to mostly .Net coders.) - I wished the requirements were more realistic, but the concept kicks ass.  Rory Blyth took on the project for the 2nd episode. [view his post] Aaron Skonnard announced from pluralsight that their own Jim Wilson is in episode 2. [here's his weblog] I'll be checking it out tonight. 

Code Ninjas & Gaming...
Software's evolving and formalizing at lightspeed.  Patterns books are fricking everywhere.  As systems designers are learning to take a step back and have a good look at the problem domains, they're learning that foresight and abstraction can give them solutions suited for problems above and beyond their problem domain.  This means all kinds of things: proven solutions, decoupling, reuse, etc blah blah blah...

But what about Games... Most people have heard by now about ea_spouse, and the shinanigans regarding EA's (and many other game firms) employment practices.  Pack a bunch of programmers and designers into a warehouse and give them a deadline, you end up with a mangled mess of sprites and code that looks and plays fine.  Fantastic... roll it out, next project!!! 

Here's where the ninjas come in: Will Wright, designer of SimCity and The Sims, did a presentation at the 2005 Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco back in March.  He explained the warehouse o' programmers & designers concept, and how, for Sims 2, the characters were animated using over 22,000 separate animations, done by hand!  The value gained from 22,000 animations was certainly not double what 11,000 animations would have been... the value was leveling off, yet to compete in the market, they had to continue providing more content.  There's nowhere to go but down after a certain point, overworked staff, overpriced games... time to take a step back.  Will did just that, by hiring “an elite strike team of coders (who, if you were to believe his slideshow, dressed like ninjas)”, and had them innovate a way around this problem.  Give the players the power to add the complexity to the game...

Spore was the result.  With abstraction (and lots of physics), an engine was created that allowed 3-d virtual worlds that scales from a microscopic, single-celled reality outward, by full orders of magnitude, to universe scale.  The article on gamespy is a must read.
[Will Wright Presents Spore... and a New Way to Think About Games]

I must be growing up, because creating such a system sounds like more fun than playing with it...