Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
chance for everyone to share his tricks, experience, and double-check things that are
critical to your project.
This implies that the programmers all trust each other, respect each other, and seek
to learn more about their craft. I
ve had the privilege of working on a programming
team that is exactly like that, and the hell of being on the other side as well. I
'
ll
choose the former, thank you very much. Find me a team that enjoys (or at least
tolerates) code reviews and performs them often, and I
'
'
ll show you a programming
team that will ship their games on time.
When I worked on Microsoft
'
s casual games, the programmers performed code
reviews for serious issues throughout the project, but they were done constantly after
content complete, for each change, no matter how minor. Most of the time, a pro-
grammer would work all day on five or six bugs and call someone who happened to
be on his way back from the bathroom to do a quick code review before he checked
everything in. This was pretty efficient, since the programmer doing the review was
already away from his computer. Studies have shown that a programmer doesn
'
tget
back into the
until 30 minutes after an interruption. I believe it, too.
Bottom line: The closer you get to zero bugs, the more checking and double-checking
you do on every semicolon. You even double-check the need to type a semicolon.
This checking installs a governor on the number and the scope of every code change,
and the governor is slowly throttled down to zero until the last bug is fixed. This
increases the quality of every change and the quality of the whole game as a result.
After that, the game is ready to ship.
“
zone
”
Code Reviews on
The Sims
Code reviews on The Sims are mandatory and somewhat automated. When a
programmer is ready to check in, he right-clicks on the change list in Perforce
and selects
This launches a plug-in that posts the code
review on an internal website and sends an email to the team. The website
shows all the changes side-by-side and allows the reviewer to comment on
any section of code. There
“
Request code review.
”
that the
reviewer must check before the code change is allowed to be checked in. This
process must be done for every single change, no matter how small. It creates
a bit of an overhead for each submission, but it ensures that at least one other
person has seen the change and given it his blessing. When you
'
s a check box that says
“
ship it!
”
'
re working on
a team with over 200 people, this kind of thing is critical.
Programmers aren
t immune to the inevitable discussions, usually late at night, about
adding some extra content into the game at the eleventh hour. It could be something
'
