The cost of not documenting software AKA why software companies will continue to need to hire and keep technical writers:
"Perhaps bizarrely, "the best documented game" in CD Projekt's history according to RuciΕski is spin-off Witcher cardgame Gwent. "In a live service environment, which you could argue Gwent was, it is easy to say that you don't have the time to document everything, because the game is changing so fast," he said. "It receives patches, new content, new balance, every month. So all those documents need to be constantly updated, and somebody has to do that. It is a cost."
The developers opted to "pay this documentation tax upfront", however, rather than kick it down the road. As a result, said RuciΕski, "new artists, new coders, new designers could jump onto any task within Gwent and contribute instantly." This demonstrates that "documentation doesn't have to slow you down, you don't have to think of documentation as something that will only be useful years later. Documentation can actually speed you up, make you faster right now."
Things didn't go nearly so well during the creation of Cyberpunk 2077 β a "true test of scale" for CD Projekt's technical writers. "Cyberpunk was a fresh start, but it came with new problems," Fulneczek recalled. "It was a massive undertaking. The hopes and expectations surrounding it were enormous. Internally, we had our documentation tool, Confluence, we had a proof of concept of 'living' documentation, so we thought, we were ready.
"But it turned out we weren't, because Cyberpunk was the first project of this scale, this size that we documented, and it also took a very long time," he went on. "And during those eight, nine years of development, we created over 8000 pages of documentation, and that's because of how complex this project was, and it also had many iterations along the way..."
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/it-was-chaos-how-the-witcher-4-and-cyberpunk-2-are-learning-from-decades-of-cd-projekts-documentation-mistakes
#TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation #Documentation #Videogames #TechnicalCommunication
prompt
herz (π₯){π}
pablolarah
Miguel Afonso Caetano
Greg ππ»π₯οΈπ
Niklas Pivic