I wonder if game development work culture is different at the engine companies vs the game studios. My hypothesis is that less/no crunch leads to better productivity...
I wouldn't say it's different but rather improved. There's still a lot of passion and focus on the exciting things rather than reliability and the politics are much more befitting game companies than corporate IT (I've worked at both). That said there's much less crunch and is much more like corporate IT in that there's a regular schedule, more known goals, and more predictability in your paycheck.
Personally I love working on a game engine since it means I can help anyone who wants to build a game. At least at my company I'd say that's definitely the prevailing reason why many of us are here. The biggest drawback at a game company by comparison is that when if you have a great idea of how to fix something you're usually under NDA and cannot help any of your friends elsewhere in the industry. At the engine company your tools help thousands of studios do things better, and solving problems for one studio typically means bugfixes for problems other studios may have as well.
I dunno, that's just kinda what it's like in comparison.
Console development still sucks. Mobile and PC with online distribution are much less stressful.
If you develop tools ship dates don't matter too much as long as you're consistently improving in ways that your customers care about.
So the cyclops looks like me, but with one big eye.
Out of curiosity, what was your role on Ultima 7? Do you know of any good articles or resources on the development of that game?
I haven't seen a lot of writing about that time but man it deserves it.
No, it seems to have been its own odd thing with no followers. There's some fans trying to remake it in Unity though. They've got quite a lot of it done: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=29400...
An amazing feat for the time! The world simulation aspect of it was really cool (and something even now you don't see that often. Like a baker going to through process of baking bread everyday)
A company I worked at shipped one PC game and swore never again. Their support costs went through the roof relative to console.
Currently been working on my own FPS for 1.5 years in UE4 (hoping to release a trailer soon) and I owe a lot to Ultima for inspiring me to learn game dev at a young age. I know Richard Garriot has been working on what is effectively UO2 with Shroud of the Avatar but sadly have not had the time to check it out.
If a game company shipped a game in a state that an engine company does it could only fly on PC and would only take a little while before players would realize that this company ships half-done games and stopped buying them immediately after release.
I am not putting down the engine companies, it's just the different priorities that both have. A game ships to a consumer who has no way of working around its bugs, an engine ships to a developer who has likely already rewritten half of the engine anyway and, even if not, is able to get back with bugs and request fixes/workarounds. For an engine company's customers it's preferable to get the new features than a 99.99% bug-free build. Game company customers are of opposite preference.