Perfect Productivity

New updates to Caster development progress here. New post to the Headgate Art Challenge here.

So in a work meeting yesterday, my team lead mentioned an expression that I really liked--"perfect productivity". Headgate Studios is an independent third party game developer and we work with Electronic Arts. We often fight with EA about working overtime and crunching and it puts a lot of pressure on my project lead. The culture and quality of life at Headgate Studios is something we value and attribute to our great results and high employee retention rate. In order to create quality while keeping to a 40 hour work week, we try to work better instead of longer hours. "Perfect productivity" refers to eliminating distractions and working in the most efficient way possible. When I've worked this way, I always feel I've put in a good day's work. When I don't, I feel somewhat lazy and or dishonest. This doesn't mean you don't take breaks, just that the time you count as work really is good solid work.

So instead of crunching into the late hours of the night away from our family, friends, and hobbies, we opt for 40 hours a week with solid results instead. I'll go into development processes and ideas about effective work methods in later posts, but I just want to point out a sad fact that people know that crunching doesn't work, but they continue to do it anyway... out of fear and habit I guess.

Educational Games

Caster update
Just updated my log on my progress this past week. Check it out here: http://www.elecorn.com/caster3d/log.html.

I'm a little ahead which means that I may have time at the end of this milestone to add a few nice things that I put on the back log because of lack of time.

Educational Games
I've been thinking a bit about educational type video games lately (edutainment as some call it). I believe that you can pick anything that you would like to teach (reading, typing, history, problem solving, memorizing, moral issues, etc) and make a fun game with it. However, I also believe that trying to teach too many different things at once can hurt the game.

The design for an educational game should start with what you want to teach. The game should then be built around it. Some people argue this and say it is better to make a good game and "sneak" little bits of learning into it. I say that most games teach things just by their nature and there is no need to "sneak" learning into a well crafted game to this end. Just sticking little bits of learning into a completed game is not a focused effort for teaching that subject and will not be as effective as it otherwise could be. This is not to say that the game needs to focus entirely on the subject to be taught, just that teaching that subject needs to stay as a core motive to the game design.

On a slightly different all games teach something. Some of this teaching makes the game more worthwhile than just in its entertainment value. Some of this teaching is demoralizing. Also, all games and media take time. How do you want to spend your time?