I'd like to see a guru collaboration to make a game, too. BYOND has a lot of talent, why not pool it for somthing?

Lord of Water

P.S. You got ShadowDarke's name right. He is no longer "ShadowDrake" :D

Stealth 2k wrote:

well like i said i dont know all the Great coders but i know they could make the best game on byond of they worked together without fighting.

This is not necessarily true... 20 great coders couldn't necessarily even make a game faster than 1 great coder, let alone better. Ever hear the saying "Too many cooks spoil the broth?" Far more important than the raw talent of the coders involved is the organization and management... someone's got to be keeping an eye on things, to make sure everything is being coded consistently and compatibly. That job is difficult enough in a one-person coding project... in a multi-person job, it takes on whole new dimensions.

The kind of thinking that leads to this "5 coders are better than 1" mentality is the kind that views coding as a one-dimensional chore. It's more complicated than that... it's more like creative problem-solving than "find which part fits," as most people seem to try to go about it.

Deadron (a better coder than most of those commonly referenced as great coders... think of how many of those "guru games" use his character handling code, or a butchered portion thereof) is involved in his own development team, which is an impressive pool of guru talent. There's a few other teams like that here and there. Those teams work because they're well-designed and well-managed, run like professional companies. Simply throwing a lot of talent in a pot and stirring it up doesn't work.

For the record, Son Veggito has managed to make some games that work, but after seeing his posts here, I hesitate to classify him as a "great coder." Yes, he knows how to do all the things he has done in the past, but I don't believe he knows how or why they work, and he certainly doesn't have a grasp on the code itself as a whole. If you want to call him a "great game builder," that's one thing, because that only hinges on whether or not you think his game is great. But coder? I'd have to see his code to judge that for certain, but my instinct says "no."

In my case I make the trade-off because together we can make games that are so much more a complete experience than I can possibly make alone. This isn't as true for Guy or Gazoot, because they are both so multi-talented that they can do both coding and multi-media for their own games.

Exactly... the advantage doesn't come from more than one person good at the same thing (especially if they may be "good" in completely different, mutually exclusive, and contradictary ways), but from people good at different things. A coder, a music wizard, and a graphic artist, for instance, will make a good match if they share a general artistic vision. Three coders will more likely be at odds without someone to play "traffic cop," and in the absence of a corporate style pay structure, where's the incentive to subvert your own vision for someone else's?

I hope no one stops liking me for that last post =(

SuperAshing wrote:

I hope no one stops liking me for that last post =(

Look on the bright side: if anyone stops liking you, that means they liked you to begin with.

Deadron wrote:

LexyBitch wrote:

This is not necessarily true... 20 great coders couldn't necessarily even make a game faster than 1 great coder, let alone better.

This is sadly true. I am 100% certain that there would be several more BYOND games in existance if the DDT members weren't working together -- we probably would have each popped out two or three more games than we have at this point.

Yeah, I don't normally work well coding with other people. The only person I have found that I can code with well without things getting screwy is Darkness, and that's because the way he codes things is very similar to the way I do, which is backwards :-/(most of the time any way). I could probably work will with Deadron too since he and I get along pretty well. I can only see 2 coders working on a project though. I mean, any more would just be pointless. When I coded with darkness, we would take turns adding things to the code, if we didn't take turns it would obviously get really cluttered and messed up. If you do it with 3 people, then you have to take turns between 3 people, which accomplishes the same thing as just 2 people.

That's the way I see things anyways. You have to be extremely organized to code things in any other fashion. In fact, I really didn't see how I could even code with other people until Darkness and I set up a system of taking turns, which works quite well to get things accomplished. We made a very kewl chatroom. Sariat started the code, Darkness added to it, then I added, then he added, and we went on like that.

Well, you CAN work well with people but as mentioned above, everything has to be run the right way or it will be a complete mess. You have to make sure that people agree completely on how things are done, the code is compatible with the rest of it, and possibly code being added in the future, and unless your getting paid is really not worth the hassle.(Such things are usually only needed in big multiplayer games such as Everquest, AO, etc where the sheer amount of code is a tad too big for just 2 ppl to do)


Also another way I cant remember what its called, but 2 ppl sit at a computer. One person types in the code, the other dictates. This way, the other person can pick up syntax errors made, or others things faster, and can keep an overall grip of the code. This requires professional cooperate as well though and most people prefer to just do it by themselves.

Alathon

Also another way I cant remember what its called, but 2 ppl sit at a computer. One person types in the code, the other dictates. This way, the other person can pick up syntax errors made, or others things faster, and can keep an overall grip of the code. This requires professional cooperate as well though and most people prefer to just do it by themselves.

This is one of the facets of the "Extreme Programming" development methodology. The "programming" part comes from what the coding pairs do in the office, and the "extreme" part refers to holding a morning meeting while drinking Mountain Dew and snowboarding.

(The first sentence is true, at least. See http://extremeprogramming.org/)