What I Learned at Activision
c0de517e.blogspot.com
c0de517e.blogspot.com
This is actually a lesson that originates from the early days of Call of Duty at IW. From what I’m told, IW never named their engine, because any time you name something it becomes a bit more of a thing, and you start working for it. And they were a studio making games, the game is the thing. Nothing else.
This taps into a really interesting idea that I've been thinking about a lot. In high school, when I first started making games, this is exactly what I'd do. I would have Unity open on two monitors, and post to my snapchat story of how excited I was to be an indie developer.
I had a similar thought when I watched the making of documentary for The Last Jedi, everyone was so excited that they were making a Star Wars movie. But in 1977, I'm sure George Lucas was just thrilled to be able to make what he wanted to make.
I think this is what PG meant when he described playing house[1]. I think there's a lower local maximum for imitating what your heroes did or innovating for the sake of innovating than the global maximum of trying to make something really good. There's nothing wrong with getting excited about what you're created, but if you have any way to direct that excitement, direct it towards making something that people will love. (Not something that you'll love making).
Also I realize I left out Hardline. It was intentional (though I heard it was a solid game despite its lackluster popularity and quick demise).
There is a horrible morass of politics in this area, to do with short term goals vs long term investment.
As a game approaches its release date, the codebase accrues technical debt in the form of title-specific hacks and optimizations, but also features and fixes that may be useful for other titles sharing the codebase. The former makes the latter difficult to propagate.
The pressure of internal milestones throughout a game project precludes the team devoting much time to significantly improving any shared codebase during any given title's development, but it also cannot happen any other way since that would involve "people not working on a game".
In this situation, a decision to mostly or entirely eschew code sharing begins to appear quite reasonable.
The director of development at BeachHead studios originally applied for Central Tech.
That is why I not decided to choose a similar position, because what I feel I'd do is asking permission from my boss to check "all the necessary information out there" to make sure I am aware of existing technology not to reinvent or miss things. Would take infinite time obviously. :D
Regardless, as their first job was in Italy I'd sooner assume they are Italian.