Author Topic: Keep a programmer from feeling pressured in terms of "goodies"  (Read 3072 times)

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Offline Hot_Dog

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Keep a programmer from feeling pressured in terms of "goodies"
« on: October 23, 2011, 11:44:32 am »
I wanted to offer more advice to help Omnimaga with being a friendly community.

A person writing a game or an application for calculators is not getting paid to do so, he or she is doing it for fun.  But a person has only so many hours in the day for "fun" as opposed to "work," so only so much can go into the game.  For this reason, the programmer has to choose what to put into a game and what to remove.  In my case, I choose what will be fun to program and what will be boring to program, even if the boring part will sweeten the look and feel of the game.  (There can be a boring portion that will take only 2 hours, and a fun portion that will take 10, yet I will still choose the fun part over the boring part ;D)

But with sufficient peer pressure, the programmer will feel obliged to add a feature because "everyone wants it."  At this point, the list of what goes into the game gets larger and larger, until the programmer is either unable to finish the game or loses interest in the game.

Does this mean we shouldn't offer suggestions?  No.  Does this mean we should say that a game with numerous bugs is absolutely outstanding?  No.  What it does mean is we need to be content when a programmer says "That's a good idea, and I understand how you feel, but I don't want to do that."  If there's a really cool side-scrolling space shooter game, and the programmer doesn't feel like going through the trouble of adding triple lasers that fire in different directions, we need to understand that it's the programmer's game, and it will never get done if he feels too pressured to continue making it.

Offline Eiyeron

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Re: Keep a programmer from feeling pressured in terms of "goodies"
« Reply #1 on: October 23, 2011, 01:53:15 pm »
I totally agree with you: A game only owns to a programmer, we don't have to force him... I see that explication with Minecraft: How many tweets I see who a person ask Notch to make some features, or this feature, and so on...

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Keep a programmer from feeling pressured in terms of "goodies"
« Reply #2 on: October 23, 2011, 02:25:41 pm »
But if I want you to make Minecraft 83+ in 3D then what do I do?? O.O ???

just kidding, I think it's best to not insist too much so someone adds a feature. We may give advice, for example, if someone has bad project practice (such as never backing up, always restarting from scratch every few month to never get anything done or something like that), but in the end it's up to the author to decide really, regardless of if it improves his project popularity or not, and someone might not like if someone insists for example so he learn ASM instead of continuing his project in BASIC (I had that happen a lot before). Also people gotta remain realistic when suggesting stuff (in terms of language used and calc power).

Offline Munchor

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Re: Keep a programmer from feeling pressured in terms of "goodies"
« Reply #3 on: October 23, 2011, 06:07:24 pm »
I understand your point Hot Dog, it's true. But some pressure is also needed. Like, if the programmer doesn't feel like adding a very major feature to the game and everybody loves it we should help him (coding, spriting, etc.) and say "That would completely change the game and make it really awesome". It may not work, and it should not be abused if the programmer really doesn't want to, but just a bit of pressure may be crucial ;)

Offline parserp

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Re: Keep a programmer from feeling pressured in terms of "goodies"
« Reply #4 on: October 23, 2011, 06:20:11 pm »
I wholeheartedly agree. :)

Offline Hot_Dog

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Re: Keep a programmer from feeling pressured in terms of "goodies"
« Reply #5 on: October 23, 2011, 06:25:28 pm »
I understand your point Hot Dog, it's true. But some pressure is also needed. Like, if the programmer doesn't feel like adding a very major feature to the game and everybody loves it we should help him (coding, spriting, etc.) and say "That would completely change the game and make it really awesome". It may not work, and it should not be abused if the programmer really doesn't want to, but just a bit of pressure may be crucial ;)

That's also a good point.  We just don't want the programmer to feel like the game will be terrible without the requested feature.