Last night presentation at Electronic Arts

Last night presentation at Electronic Arts was a very interesting experience. Presenter made a few good remarks about developing banking software vs. entertainment software (boy, do I know the difference!). Presentation was very informative with lots of information on what is new and interesting in the gaming industry. It’s still rapidly growing industry and constantly changing: lots of new technologies, many new ideas to make games more realistic. Also new business opportunities like advertising, apparently people spend more time playing games then watching TV. At the end of presentation Burt had answered quite a few questions, I was even able to slip a few of my own... 10 minutes tour after the presentation was about gym, cafeteria and internal digital library. It is a very nice office, I must say, but too many doors and “checkpoints” for my taste, too much security, too many secrets. You can see, feel and smell the wealth though. Here are a few pieces of information I have found to be interesting:

• They are using Flash and ActionScript for prototyping instead of developing their own tool. Easy to use, many people know how to use it. I think 3D is done in Maya.
• They have plans for mobile market.
• Typical product schedule: a. Preproduction (prototyping, brainstorming) 4 months b. Production, development 5 months c. Alpha, Beta, bug fix 5 months d. Pushing release date is not an option
• Development platform Windows, DevStudio
• Perforce source control
• Products has to run for many days non stop before releases to insure quality
• 1,000,000 lines of code is a typical product
• Code base is very dynamic, rewritten often
• Many different methodologies for different things
• Team work, collaboration, stimulating creative thinking: Group Activities, Lego for architecting and brainstorming ideas etc.
• They are aggressively hiring: software engineers, project managers, artists and producers, don’t expect people to be already gurus in the area, they will train them.
• The level of contribution is the measure of success.
• Learning of new technologies is highly encouraged.
• Online business is growing rapidly.
• Multiple major product lines: sports, doom like, other.
• New generation consoles will allow much greater quality and realistic 3D rendering. They have more memory 64M vs. 512M, 2000 polygons vs. 30000 polygons, multiple CPUs