Sometimes lazy is good though, if you're really smart about it. Writing a program once instead of doing a bunch of the same math yourself over and over is a smart, lazy choice that pays off and allows you to get more done with less effort. That kind of lazy works great.
Yes, there is a sort of enlightened laziness that characterizes programmers. Larry Wall (author of Perl) famously made this his first virtue of a programmer.
Laziness - The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer.
That's not exactly the type of laziness we're talking about here though.
We are prepared to live in the plain and die in the plain!
There are two reasons I would call a developer lazy:
1. Obvious bugs/glitches - meaning they didnt test it enough or just didnt care
2. Non remappable/reprogramable controls - this is just laziness. From the coders Ive talked to about this at length they have all said it takes about an hour to program and for some reasons most developers dont add it?
fastbilly1 wrote:2. Non remappable/reprogramable controls - this is just laziness. From the coders Ive talked to about this at length they have all said it takes about an hour to program and for some reasons most developers dont add it?
Yeah, remappable controls is pretty simple to pull off. I think you might end up spending more time getting one of your artists to make the interface than you would with the actual code.
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
Hatta wrote:That's not exactly the type of laziness we're talking about here though.
No it isn't, but that was sort of the point. It's important to ask the right questions, and the right question isn't whether developers are lazy. The question is whether certain developers are the right kind of lazy, or whether that is the real cause of so many complaints from gamers.
I have limited programming experience. Like I've played around with BASIC languages and kinda sorta read about other programming languages. However, I do feel that this little programming experience has given me much greater appreciation for games. Not only do I realize how hard it is to stay focused and work on the same thing for extended periods of time, I also have a slight understanding of how some things can be harder to do than others and I recognize some of these.
Occasionally I'm playing a game and I just think "dang, that must have been hard to do". Sometimes I'll be playing a game and think "whoa, the programmers put that and a lot of people probably haven't noticed that"
fastbilly1 wrote:2. Non remappable/reprogramable controls - this is just laziness. From the coders Ive talked to about this at length they have all said it takes about an hour to program and for some reasons most developers dont add it?
Yeah, remappable controls is pretty simple to pull off. I think you might end up spending more time getting one of your artists to make the interface than you would with the actual code.
Indeed. Every game released today should have remappable controls. You should be able to rearrange every button on a pad except start and home, and every key on the keyboard except ESC. No exceptions. You should be able to make the stupidest layout if you want.
Also tutorials, cut scenes, text should always be skippable. Sure, make it a key that's not under my thumb or ask if I'm sure to avoid skipping accidentally, but never force me to go through 5 minutes of stuff I've seen before or don't care. Ever.
fastbilly1 wrote:2. Non remappable/reprogramable controls - this is just laziness. From the coders Ive talked to about this at length they have all said it takes about an hour to program and for some reasons most developers dont add it?
Yeah, remappable controls is pretty simple to pull off. I think you might end up spending more time getting one of your artists to make the interface than you would with the actual code.
Indeed. Every game released today should have remappable controls. You should be able to rearrange every button on a pad except start and home, and every key on the keyboard except ESC. No exceptions. You should be able to make the stupidest layout if you want.
Corellary; when you allow us to remap stuff make sure it carries over into whatever minigame you included in. I can think of a few PC games where a minigame would still use the default controls, or worse, used a mixture of default and custom controls.
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
fastbilly1 wrote:2. Non remappable/reprogramable controls - this is just laziness. From the coders Ive talked to about this at length they have all said it takes about an hour to program and for some reasons most developers dont add it?
Yeah, remappable controls is pretty simple to pull off. I think you might end up spending more time getting one of your artists to make the interface than you would with the actual code.
Indeed. Every game released today should have remappable controls. You should be able to rearrange every button on a pad except start and home, and every key on the keyboard except ESC. No exceptions. You should be able to make the stupidest layout if you want.
Also tutorials, cut scenes, text should always be skippable. Sure, make it a key that's not under my thumb or ask if I'm sure to avoid skipping accidentally, but never force me to go through 5 minutes of stuff I've seen before or don't care. Ever.
Yeah, that really aggravates me a lot. You have no idea. I really wish these kinds of things would just be standard by now. Video games really need to pick up speed. We're almost in 2011 now. Between game over screens, pre-title screen company logos, load screens and unskippable cutscenes, games checking your profiles, etc. we're really not spending enough time actually PLAYING our games these days
EDIT: I don't like redundant dialogue either. I don't need to be told fifty times to shoot the robot in the eye, or take point commander shepherd, or insert the key in the door, etc, etc. I'M NOT DEAF YOU STUPID VIDEO GAME CHARACTERS!
RyaNtheSlayA wrote:
Seriously. Screw you Shao Kahn I'm gonna play Animal Crossing.
My definition of lazy development is when you absolutely have to buy the $20.00 strategy guide to get 100% completion of the game. To honest though, a lot of the "lazy" decisions made when making games is not the developers fault all the time. You can thank the suits funding the game for that. I understand they have to crack the whip to get the product out as fast as possible, but don't sell me a broken, unfinished game. Then after its been released for 2 weeks and I'm sick of the game, force me to download a 500MB patch before I can play the game.
Normally I would say that a developer is "lazy" when I know they can make a better game with very little work and they are aware of this fact but choose not to.
For example. Pump it up is a dance game and you normally have 5 difficulty levels. Since the day the first version of the game was released until 7 years later a song only had one! They released tons of updates to the game but they didn't bother to add the missing levels to that song. In fact, when they did they only added one! That's what I call lazy.
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