Last Online: 3/19/07
Jeff Freeman
| Game | What I Did | Difficulty of Development | Anecdote |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design | Still having nightmares | One time in beta, some admin-level commands needed to be executed on the server, which only the platform group in San Diego had access to. As the time and test had been announced, testers were trying to login, and now this problem was preventing that from happening. Without quick resolution, we'd lose them, and look like idiots, too. The server admins were much more familiar with the Windows NT servers that EverQuest used than with the linux servers we were running. Our programmer had so much difficultly explaining what to do, eventually out of frustration he hacked in to the server, changed the admin password to log in as admin, executed the commands himself, and emailed the platform group their new admin password (without apology or explanation). The next day, "coincidentally", they scanned every drive in our office, found someone had a pirate copy of the Spiderman movie on a public drive (among other things public and private), and reported these violations directly to the CEO. An email from the CEO to everyone in the studio gave 15 minutes to delete every bit of every copyright-infringing thing, OR ELSE. Mind, Spiderman wasn't even out on DVD yet, and it was A BIG DEAL for Sony Pictures... SOE's sole parent at the time. Any movie would have been a stupid thing to keep a pirated copy of on a network drive, but that was the specifically MOST stupid one to have. So he left absolutely no question as to what the "or else" meant, nor how absolute that 15 minute deadline was. But still, it always seemed like a retaliation tattle-tale attack from the server admins being pwn'd by our resident linux-god. | |
| Lead Content Design | Not Bad | We shipped this on schedule without crunching... at all. A key difference was starting this project with a micro-team, ramping up to a small team as necessary, and only blossoming into a full team when we needed a full team. Counter-intuitive as that may sound: starting with less than a handful of developers, aiming for a small team through most of the project and ramping up to that slowly, resulted in staying on target throughout the project. A big team from day one would have resulted in more man-hours devoted to the game, but would have increased how many many-hours were needed to finish it by more. |
