Sounds like it's never a boring day.
Do the developers crunch a lot these days?
There are two types of crunch we see these days.
1. The 3 week crunch... Just to meet some milestone... Dev Alpha... Dev Beta... Whatever.
2. The long term crunch... 6 days a week. 15 hour days (often longer) working your asses off to make deadlines.
Depends on where the game is at and how good the producers were to get their people on board to get stuff done.
Tu Holmes
Tell us how a normal day at your office looks like.
For example, the most hectic day during production of WarFighter.
05:00 Bowl of Cereal, Kale Greens
6:00 Drive to work whilst listening to Jethro Tull
07:35 Spank Lisa at Art Dep
etc etc
Well, most hectic day and average day are not always one and the same... But an average day during crunch.
7:30: Walk into Office
7:30 - 7:45: check email and look into any overnight production issues.. Resolve issues and kick off any leftover jobs
7:50: Walk into Gym
7:55-9:00: Workout
9:00: Grab Breakfast and walk back to desk:
9:15-10:00: Handle any left over requests that have come in... Check current build farm and utilization on clusters. Look at storage and network performance tools... Verify all things look green.
10:15: Developers are starting to filter in... Find random issues that pop up. (For instance, a new building tenant cut network cables going to the developers hexes... Find this out and put in T&M order for our electricians to repair)
11:00: Stand ups with teams... Where are we at today... Are there issues to resolve.
11:30: Meet with manager... let him know what's going on... Outstanding issues. Resolution timeframes.
12:00: Talk with video editing staff about on-going needs.
12:30: Lunch
1:30: Meetings start for global project initiatives I'm on... These usually last until about 3:30 or 4.
3:30 (or 4): Walk around developer areas... Say hello to people and spot check with Technical Directors and Development Directors on how the day is going. Anything pop up that we seemed to miss earlier. Verify resolutions of previous issues.
4:30: Meetings Producers... Any issues that we have not been notified of.
5:00: Roam through Data Center to check on hardware.
5:30: Deploy any new hardware for Build pipeline... New VMs... Build updates... extra storage... Whatever.
6:00: Look at requests that came in during the day... Verify the Jr guys are resolving all requests... Anything they can't resolve comes to me.
7:00: Post Day discussion with manager.
7:30: Dinner... Whatever is brought in for the day.
The rest of the evening until Midnight is usually me going over odds and ends. Watching some TV while being around in case it hits the fan. Usually it's just free time, but on occasion we have ridiculous shit that happens and we have to bust hump.
I've even helped build new workstations because the team has given us notice at the last minute. (That's rare, but when it's busy busy, you just pitch in)
What do you guys use to parallelize? Just teamCity like build infrastructure or do split at compilation level? We used to use something Xoerax for C/C++ code, worked ok, now it's all custom shit using Hadoop..
Serious business..
Currently we use incredibuild (That's Xoreax) to actually handle the "build engine" portion... I use Jenkins an open source product for Command and Conquer to manage what Incredibuild is doing. For WarFighter we used an in house tool that DICE built called "MonkeyFarm".
Good to see another person in the industry. I've often contemplated moving over to games from VFX but I'd probably only work for a place like Naughty Dog or Valve. Not really big into the huge corporate mentality of EA and the like. I do have a lot of friends at EA who love it though.
No place is perfect you know... The grass is always greener situation... Personally, I like my job... Is the corporate mentality sometimes an issue? Of course, but let's be real... A bad day making video games is better than a day doing almost anything else.
I have worked in a lot of different businesses and this is so far the best.
