Developing a game requires many different teams to work together. These teams generally work to ensure that versions developed for different consoles or PC are compatible with each other. And naturally, teams are expected to communicate with each other, use similar methods, and ultimately produce similar experiences.
However, things don’t seem to work that way in EA, it seems. Different teams take very different approaches to development, according to a blog post by former EA developer Adam Berg. This prevents game versions from coming to an end at the same speed.
Adam says that while working for FIFA he dealt with the Wii, PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS versions of the game, and describes his experience as follows: “I’m not kidding; it could take a whole day to change the 3 lines of code and know it really worked. Sometimes it could take a few seasons in career mode to see if the code was working properly. It might even be necessary to advance, and there was no easy way for the team I was in.”
Adam then went to work for a different team within EA focused on newer consoles. This team had the opportunity to use “test beds” so as not to do everything manually. So they could test smaller pieces of code without having to scroll through several hours of gameplay.
Still, he says many on his team didn’t use the possibility: “I was very excited! But I watched the people around me and it was clear that many of them didn’t even know how to use this tool. Instead, to test a change, I would go the old way, manually navigating the UI to get where they need to be.” I quickly became the champion of the test environment and frequently added new features that made it easy to develop new things.”
Before leaving the company, Adam says he joined another team that used “unit testing” that focused on smaller code areas, and that unit had the fastest process.
All of this shows that the development methodology and opportunities offered at EA can differ drastically from one team to the next. In other words, Adam reveals that even in a giant company like EA, teams do not work in harmony as expected.
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