When Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64 came out it it really felt like flying was one of the best ways to take advantage of 3d. There haven’t been as many games that let you fly freeform in an open world as I had thought there’d be. Though I guess many AC’s recently have let you, that always felt lacking to me for some reason…

“This isn’t particularly true.”

I came here to say the same thing. We do a post-mortem after every single project with our core staff of supervisors and directors. Otherwise, you are just assuming everything is fine and dandy. They can be brief, but we normally do something every single time. 

The more accurate statement would be “if your postmortem keeps identifying the same problem for the same reason, maybe you’re not doing postmortem right.” Or whatever word you want to use instead of postmortem.

Yeah if you DON’T do postmortems in software, even if the project went “perfectly”, it’s a giant red flag. On one hand, you identify techniques that worked and continue them in the future. On the other, you find what didn’t work and correct it. And there’s ALWAYS something that didn’t work. Always.

Yeah, I don’t think the author knows what a postmortem is. I suspect they think it’s something you do when something bad happens rather than something you do when a project ends.

Doing an after action review is a standard part of literally every significant project I’ve worked on at my job. 

I was bothered by the line you quoted. Examining what happened during a development cycle to see what could have been done better strikes me as largely positive thing. Naughty Dog saying that they do this doesn’t automatically mean the company did not learn lessons from any of the other examinations; it could just as…

If a job requires 80+ hours a week... hire 2 fucking people. No one should EVER work that much. There is no benefit to overworking people.

Agree. That was one big egregious statement in an otherwise solid piece. Post Mortems are Transparency. You should do them often.

Everyone knows that people love to work themselves to death so some asshole in a suit can get a bigger bonus this quarter.

Not just design... pretty much any org that has projects regularly go through them. If it is a group that was assembled one time for one project then disbanded as they were no longer needed with no plans to ever tackle the project again, that might be the only time a post-mortem isn’t needed.

They always think they are clever when they ooze in, squealing about entitlement and bootstraps and going “You are lazy, I work 80 a week and do it freely.”

Agreed: post-mortems are good for identifying what went well in a production as well as what didn’t. This wasn’t the best angle to get a dig in at Naughty Dog.

Agree, every project is different and all of them can teach you things that work and don’t work. Post Mortems should be standard.

In any design based business, at the end of the project you should have at least some in-depth analysis done on what worked great, what didn’t perform as well as it could have, any communication issues, timing, lessons learned (if needed).  If you’re not doing some kind of post-mortem, you’re doing something wrong. …

Look, you might be just fine licking boots in your industry, and more power to you. The rest of us understand that “everyone does it this way” is not an excuse for anyone doing it this way. “It’s bad everywhere, so we should just give up trying to make it better anywhere,” is a cowardly, lazy outlook.

Has anyone else noticed the literal same conversation occurring across all industries, all the time?

The great enemy of design is that people like what they’re familiar with, resent having to adapt to a new thing and underrate the idea that the new thing will grow on them. See: every new logo launch ever.