T w e n t y S i d e d

Ugh. Monday morning. I’m not a fan. Bad things happen on Monday mornings. For example, this:

Well, the week can only get better from here, right?

(“Thanks” to Leslee for the link.)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I’ve heard many of these excuses and pleas before, or variants on these themes, and I’ve never even been involved in the financial end of things. This really is how people do business, and it’s sort of funny to see this same thinking applied to everyday situations. I watch this and nod my head, this is SO true.

Having said that, I actually think it’s not unreasonable to haggle a bit when you’re negotiating for goods or services that you’ll be using for years and that will run you in the millions of dollars. As a vendor, you can’t just slap a $999,998.98 pricetag on something and call it a day. Well, you can but you’ll be losing money on one side or the other if you just stick to that price. Some companies will be huge and rolling in cash, and your product is peanuts to them. To them, buying your stuff is the equivalent of a beer run. They just don’t want a lot of hassle, and you can pad the everlovin’ crap out of your invoices and they’ll never care. On the other hand, a mid-size company might only be able to buy your thing if you come down a bit. If you start high and let them haggle you down, you’ll get as much as possible from both types of clients.

But the price isn’t the really volatile part of the equation in my experience. As someone who has done some contract work, the place they really bleed you dry is in the implementation. It’s no good feeling smug when you get the customer to pay $10k for $5k worth of programming, only to have them squeeze $20k worth of work out of you with endless changes, refinements, and new features masquerading as “bug fixes”.

A skit about that would have the customer agree to pay $100 for their steak dinner ahead of time, but then nickle and dime the restaurant by asking for endless small little freebies and favors during the meal. (And sort of passive-aggressively holding the entire check ransom each time you balk at their demands.) By the time they leave they’ve had a steak dinner, three bottles of wine, two desserts, and they’ve left with the silverware, a chair, and the waitress. You started out so happy you were going to sell them $9 worth of meat and labor for $100, and now you’re wondering if you can escape this deal while you still have a restaurant.

It’s worth a great deal to me to be as far from the financial end of the business as possible. Let me write the code and for the love of ANSI don’t tell me anything about the money, it will only drive me mad.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

You know, seeing this guy talk about his work really changed my perception of Crytek and, by extension, Crysis. I still think their pursuit of graphics spectacle is self-defeating, but I was glad to see it was because the guy has a genuine passion for graphics, and not because they thought it was the key to great sales. I thought it was hilarious that he began by talking about the fact that his favorite games were always the ones that didn’t run on his computer, since Crysis has now become the poster child for that very problem.

I do take issue with his praise of the AI they have. I think it is and was the weakest aspect of their games. (Aside from the difficulties in running them.) The fact that sticking your elbow out from behind a fern at 100 meters will result in every single foe in the area zeroing in on you and then flawlessly tracking you through the foliage is a major frustration. The fact that they can hear your footsteps three rooms away and then know that they are the footsteps of an armed foe (and not one of their own guys) is another glaring shortcoming. They’re not particularly good at flanking you or working together to flush you out. They’re drooling morons with superhuman eyes and ears.

It’s also interesting to see how deliberate the play of Far Cry was. They made it big, bright, open, and unscripted because other games (I’m sure they were thinking of iD Software) made games about fighting in dark tunnels. Looking at Far Cry, you can see what parts of the game they cared about and had a passion for (lush outdoor visuals, action set pieces, dynamic encounters) and which ones they thought were unimportant. (Story, dialog, acting.)

And yes, the graphics are pretty amazing. It’s five years old and Far Cry still looks great.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.